Consider adding a devcontainer

[Bisaloo]

So:

• Docker users can get started immediately with a working system including all necessary dependencies
• Developers away from a computer with a working installation (or on a phone) can still access R via GitHub Codespaces

[Bisaloo]

cc @joshwlambert. This could address some of your concerns about the difficulty to set up a working development environment for contributors.

My main concern here is that it would potentially require some knowledge of docker, which doesn't necessarily seems like a step towards an easier setup.

Do you have thoughts on this?

[joshwlambert]

I've never used docker, so I'm unable to comment on whether it would be an improvement in ease of contribution, and if it were an improvement, how this trades off with the added complexity of managing the container.

Do you know of any GHA workflows that build and output a container that would not be part of the package but would be temporarily stored as an output of the workflow? This would then give a backup if struggling to install the package.

To explore this option it might be good to have a live run through of initialising docker with an existing Epiverse-TRACE package to get the basics.

[bahadzie]

Do you know of any GHA workflows that build and output a container that would not be part of the package but would be temporarily stored as an output of the workflow? This would then give a backup if struggling to install the package.

I built one a while ago to speed up the time it takes to run our Github workflows pipelines. At the time the only workflow that I couldn't run in the container was pkgdown which had dependencies on an OS library called libv8.

I can look into installing an existing Epiverse-TRACE package if we still want to investigate this option. Let me know which package if any you would like me to use as a test case.