Current release build broken - Rv4.0 incompatibilities?

[marklcrowe]

Hi, there looks to have been bugs introduced in the most recently build of episode 05-data-structures-part2. Specifically, the last table of the "Adding columns and rows in data frames" section and the first two of "Removing rows" are broken in the final .md output (NAs where there should be data, data, where there should be NAs).

My guess is that it's a consequence of the build being performed with R4.0, with the switch to stringsAsFactors = FALSE on read.csv giving different dataframe structures and so unexpected outputs. And because it's a build issue rather than a code error, I can't lodge a pull request to try to fix it.

Are you able to roll back to a previous version of this .md file until the episode has been updated enough to be compatible with R 4.0 please? At the moment, it's wrong for all versions of R!

Thanks very much

Cheers, Mark

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[jcoliver]

Thanks, @marklcrowe . We're looking into this now.

[jcoliver]

This is indeed caused by the development of lesson materials for R versions < 4.0, while the Travis CI uses R 4.0 to build the lesson that is displayed. With the use of Travis CI, md files are no longer used for the display of lesson materials, so replacing the md files will not change what is displayed on the lesson site. The ideal options include revising the lesson material to (1) use all R 4.0, whereby the factor errors thrown by adding a new coat color go away and/or (2) add information about the varied behavior of read.csv between different versions of R.

[jcoliver]

Stopgap PR in #684 for episodes 4 & 5, but longer term solution in the works.

[mlell]

@jcoliver This is a proposed solution, among other things: #737 : Get rid of factors

[naupaka]

Closing as addressed with removal of factors