Port across vignettes and other doc contents from the RQGIS package

[Robinlovelace]

Heads-up @jannes-m and @paleolimbot I'm planning to put in a PR that's a general tidy-up and look at this. I think the more that is ported across from https://github.com/r-spatial/RQGIS3 the better and that the package's authors are best placed to do that. https://github.com/r-spatial/RQGIS3/blob/master/vignettes/install_guide.Rmd in particular is a handy guide to install QGIS on any platform, which should probably be updated for QGIS 3.14.

A more detailed doc is this, which I think provides a good basis for testing this. Any idea where the source code of that is and could it be ported to an updated vignette?: https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2017/RJ-2017-067/index.html

[jannes-m]

@Robinlovelace what do you mean by source code of the RQGIS R Journal paper - the tex-file? The code used in the paper can be also found under https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2017/RJ-2017-067/RJ-2017-067.zip.

[Robinlovelace]

Hi @jannes-m I meant it could be useful to reproduce some parts of the paper into the package as a vignette. What do you and @paleolimbot think of that? I think the example you show here r-spatial/discuss#41 (comment) is a great candidate for a vignette and that you'd be an ideal person to contribute to a qgisprocessing introductory vignette that can go beyond the brief comments in the README.

[jannes-m]

Which parts of the paper do you mean exactly? I suppose some of the code examples, right? And yes, we can use these as a blueprint for a qgisprocess vignette. @paleolimbot If you want me to, I can start writing a draft of a vignette or is it still too early since the package is still under active development? We can also port at least some of the tests from RQGIS3 to qgisprocess. Again, @paleolimbot let me know if you want me to do that.

[Robinlovelace]

Which parts of the paper do you mean exactly? I suppose some of the code examples, right?

Yes I think it will be really cool to demonstrate that it's possible to use qgisprocessing to solve the same problems that were solved with RQGIS in the paper. If we could also add a few more examples to the vignette that would be awesome.

[paleolimbot]

I'd love to see any vignettes! I realistically don't have time to write anything long-form at the moment, but the paper is excellent and the process of writing the vignette will probably identify some rough edges that could be improved. If either of you would be up for it, it would make a lovely addition! I think the general pattern of calling qgisprocess won't change (unless one of you says it needs to, which would be totally fine!), but the ability to pass R objects to QGIS algorithms will get better.

It might be cool to wrap this another package with functions for each algorithm (possibly generated automatically with tweaking) so that you could just qgis::qgis_buffer() and/or ?qgis::qgis_buffer. Much more R-like, but also harder to maintain if an algorithm changes between versions.

[Robinlovelace]

It might be cool to wrap this another package with functions for each algorithm (possibly generated automatically with tweaking) so that you could just qgis::qgis_buffer() and/or ?qgis::qgis_buffer. Much more R-like, but also harder to maintain if an algorithm changes between versions.

Interesting idea, makes me think of function factories: https://adv-r.hadley.nz/function-factories.html

Could we create a function factory to do that? Note that the number of algorithms that are available changes depending on the packages installed on the system. The OSGeo4W installation came with 900+ algorithms... Overall I'm in favour of the idea if feasible but see documentation of the existing strategy as a no regrets strategy that can run in parallel. I think @jannes-m is the ideal person to write a vignette, being the lead author of the RQGIS paper and of the 'GIS bridges' chapter in Geocomputation with R (which will benefit from this package): https://geocompr.robinlovelace.net/gis.html

[paleolimbot]

Just flagging #31 since it's the PR implementing this

[florisvdh]

Closed by PR #144.