Pins as a possible future target data object

[asadow]

Is there any plan to allow pins as target data objects? My use case would be version control inside OneDrive, with pins potentially living outside the project folder.

[wlandau]

You can invoke pins in a target if you call pins::board_register_github() and then pins::pin() inside the command of a target. The idea is very similar to my sketch of a vetiver pipeline at #1001. I do not plan to create a special storage format for a pin because pins are usually downstream of everything else and do not typically have other targets that depend on them.

[wlandau]

That said, you can define your own pin format with targets::tar_format().

[wlandau]

In fact, I plan to recommend tar_format() going forward for these specialized cases. (I wish I had done this from the beginning for format = "keras" and format = "torch").

I am still open to consider new formats if they apply to more general kinds of R objects: for example, for data frames, if something ever supersedes or outperforms arrow.