rOpenSci News Digest, November 2024

Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup!

You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

rOpenSci HQ

Looking for Maintainers to Support First-Time Contributors

Now open to non-rOpenSci package maintainers!

Making your first contribution to Open Source can be both empowering and intimidating. As such, we’re exited to announce a special series of activities to support first-time contributors! 🎉

Are you an package maintainer who would like to help someone make their first contribution? We limited our initial call to rOpenSci package maintainers, but we still have some room, so have decided to open this up to all package maintainers!

See our blog post for more details and how to sign up (by December 9th).

A fast R-Universe!

Thanks to optimized caching, the web front-end pages load much faster, making it even more fun to browse around the R ecosystem.

Yanina Bellini Saibene’s keynote talk at CarpentryConnect and BioNT 2024

In her keynote Yanina Bellini Saibene invited the audience to reflect on how to measure the impact of our work in our communities. She shared two frameworks we use at rOpenSci and severals tool to measure different aspects of our work and our impact, not only with numbers, but with stories. Slidedeck.

Tradução + Hackathon = Traslatón rOpenSci

We had a very nice and productive event during LatinR, with people registered from thirteen countries. Some people stayed for the whole event and others participated during some of the working sessions.

We discussed the GitHub workflow and the babelquarto and babeldown packages. We also reviewed the translation guidelines and started working on a Portuguese glossary for the translations.

Participants worked on reviewing the rOpenSci dev guide. As a result, we now have two more chapters with their first review started, two chapters with the second review under work, and five chapters merged with the complete translation. We also started the translation of our Code of Conduct. 🚀

We are very grateful to Pedro Faria, Beatriz Milz, Francesca Palmeira, Rafael Fontenelle, Ildeberto Vasconcelos, Samuel Carleial, and Ariana Cabral for their contributions during the Traslatón 🙏.

If you want to participate in this collaborative translation effort, please check out our project and add a comment to the pull request you would like to review.

Community Call “A comunidade R fala português” Resources

All the resources for our first community call in português are now available on our website.

Check the video, speakers slides, and links to other resources related to translation efforts in the R Community.

Give Thanks with the allcontributors Package

Mark Padgham published a blog post about his allcontributors package, which provides a very easy way to acknowledge all contributions to your software.

Coworking

Join us for social coworking & office hours monthly on first Tuesdays! Hosted by Steffi LaZerte and various community hosts. Everyone welcome. No RSVP needed. Consult our Events page to find your local time and how to join.

• Tuesday, December 3rd, 09:00 Australia Western (01:00 UTC), “Getting Involved in the Antarctic/Southern Ocean rOpenSci Community” with cohosts Michael Sumner and Ben Raymond, and Steffi LaZerte.

  • Explore rOpenSci R packages supporting Antarctic and Southern Ocean Research.
  • Chat with our cohosts to find out how you can be involved in this community.

• Tuesday, January 14th, 14:00 European Central (13:00 UTC), “Working with Parquet in R” with cohosts Rainer M Krug, and Steffi LaZerte.

  • Read up on what Parquet is.
  • Explore how to use Parquet in R.
  • Meet community host, Rainer Krug, and discuss benefits and tips for using Parquet in R and how you might use it in your work.

And remember, you can always cowork independently on work related to R, work on packages that tend to be neglected, or work on what ever you need to get done!

Software 📦

Discover more packages, read more about Software Peer Review.

New versions

The following twenty-one packages have had an update since the last newsletter: rsi (v0.3.1), allcontributors (v0.2.2), av (v0.9.3), comtradr (v1.0.3), FedData (v4.1.0), gitignore (v0.1.8.9000), GLMMcosinor (v0.2.1), jagstargets (1.2.2), lingtypology (v1.1.20v1), nodbi (v0.11.0), occCite (v0.5.9), osmapiR (v0.2.2), osmextract (v0.5.2), readODS (v2.3.1), ruODK (v1.5.1), spatsoc (v0.2.7), stats19 (v3.2.0), tarchetypes (0.11.0), targets (1.9.0), UCSCXenaTools (v1.6.0), and weathercan (v0.7.2).

Software Peer Review

There are twelve recently closed and active submissions and 7 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages:

• One at ‘5/awaiting-reviewer(s)-response’:

  • agromet, Índices y Estadísticos Climáticos e Hidrológicos. Submitted by Paola Corrales.

• Four at ‘4/review(s)-in-awaiting-changes’:

  • rredlist, IUCN Red List Client. Submitted by William Gearty.

  • fireexposuR, Compute and Visualize Wildfire Exposure. Submitted by Air Forbes.

  • cancerprof, API Client for State Cancer Profiles. Submitted by Brian Park.

  • gigs, Assess Fetal, Newborn, and Child Growth with International Standards. Submitted by Simon Parker. (Stats).

• Three at ‘3/reviewer(s)-assigned’:

  • mbquartR, Finding Manitoba Quarter Sections. Submitted by Alex Koiter.

  • sits, Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Earth Observation Data Cubes. Submitted by Gilberto Camara.

  • fwildclusterboot, Fast Wild Cluster Bootstrap Inference for Linear Models. Submitted by Alexander Fischer. (Stats).

• Two at ‘2/seeking-reviewer(s)’:

  • QuadratiK, A Collection of Methods Using Kernel-Based Quadratic Distances for. Submitted by Giovanni Saraceno. (Stats).

  • galamm, Generalized Additive Latent and Mixed Models. Submitted by Øystein Sørensen. (Stats).

• Two at ‘1/editor-checks’:

  • pkgmatch, Find R Packages Matching Either Descriptions or Other R Packages. Submitted by mark padgham.

  • forcis, An R Client to Access the FORCIS Database. Submitted by Nicolas Casajus.

Find out more about Software Peer Review and how to get involved.

On the blog

• Looking for Maintainers to Support First-Time Contributors by Steffi LaZerte and Yanina Bellini Saibene. Announcing a Community Call and Coworking sessions to support first contributions.

• Give Thanks with the allcontributors Package by Mark Padgham. The allcontributors package helps to given thanks to software contributions.

Calls for contributions

Calls for maintainers

If you’re interested in maintaining any of the R packages below, you might enjoy reading our blog post What Does It Mean to Maintain a Package?.

• hddtools, Hydrological Data Discovery Tools. Issue for volunteering.

• circle, R client package for the Continuous Integration (CI) provider Circle CI. Issue for volunteering.

• tic, Tasks Integrating Continuously: CI-Agnostic Workflow Definitions. Issue for volunteering.

• USAboundaries (and USAboundariesdata), historical and contemporary boundaries of the United States of America . Issue for volunteering.

• historydata, datasets for historians. Issue for volunteering.

Calls for contributions

Refer to our help wanted page – before opening a PR, we recommend asking in the issue whether help is still needed.

The bib2f package, for parsing BibTeX files into tibbles, would need some help! Issue for volunteering.

Package development corner

Some useful tips for R package developers. 👀

posit::conf(2024) session recordings

The recordings of talks at posit::conf(2024) are now available on YouTube. Particularly relevant for package developers are:

• Why’d you load that package for? by Luis D. Verde Arregoitia.

• Open-Source Initiatives in Pharma – What’s Out There and Why You Should Join by Nicholas Masel.

• Art of R Packages: Forging Community with Hex Stickers by Hubert Halun.

• Introducing Positron, a new data science IDE by Julia Silge, Isabel Zimmerman, Tom Mock, Jonathan McPherson, Lionel Henry, Davis Vaughan, and Jenny Bryan.

• Contributing to the R Project by Heather Turner.

• API-first package design — and learning patchwork in the process by Thomas Lin Pedersen.

• “Please Let Me Merge Before I Start Crying”: And Other Things I’ve Said at The Git Terminal by Meghan Harris.

• Mixing R, Python, and Quarto: Crafting the Perfect Open Source Cocktail by Alenka Frim & Nic Crane.

… and more! Happy watching.

API packages and CRAN

Don’t miss the blog post Handling CRAN Requirements for Web API R Packages by James Balamuta!

Also relevant, this chapter of the HTTP testing in R book: CRAN- (and Bioconductor) preparedness for your tests.

Update your GitHub Actions workflow

If you were still using version 3 of the Artifacts action, upgrade as your workflows will start failing. Thanks to Hugo Gruson for pointing this out!

A tip by Jacob Wujciak-Jens: Github provides the dependabot service that can help you keep actions updated hassle free! Just add the following simple yaml file as .github/dependabot.yml in your repo and a friendly bot will open PRs to keep you workflows up to date!

version: 2
updates:
 - package-ecosystem: "github-actions"
 directory: "/"
 schedule:
 interval: "monthly"
 open-pull-requests-limit: 10

An attack vector on GitHub Actions

Thanks to Zhian Kamvar for bringing up the article “ArtiPACKED: Hacking Giants Through a Race Condition in GitHub Actions Artifacts” in our slack workspace. In Zhian’s words: if you upload an artifact that contains the .git/ directory of a cloned repo, the GITHUB_TOKEN is exposed. While it expires at the end of the run, there is a small delay, which is long enough for a targeted attack. The solution is to set persist-credentials: false for every actions/checkout run.

Last words

Thanks for reading! If you want to get involved with rOpenSci, check out our Contributing Guide that can help direct you to the right place, whether you want to make code contributions, non-code contributions, or contribute in other ways like sharing use cases. You can also support our work through donations.

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