Potential automation of packagetemplate updates to other epiverse packages

[joshwlambert]

As new updates are applied to packagetemplate, the existing epiverse packages in development may retain outdated workflows or other package components. It would be good to think about whether there is a way to somehow automate the process of updates in packagetemplate triggering updates on the rest of the epiverse packages.

I'm not sure how this would be done, perhaps some sort of workflow that opens a pull request on the existing packages.

[Bisaloo]

I don't have a great solution at the moment.

perhaps some sort of workflow that opens a pull request on the existing packages.

I thought about the workflow to open PR but the issue is that individual packages might have specific tweaks to their workflows (e.g., a package to parse dates might want to run tests in different locales).

I'm afraid this could generate a lot of false positives and be annoying to package maintainers.

One solution might be to compare the workflow in the individual packages with the old workflows in packagetemplate and if they match, propose an update to the new workflows in packagetemplate. But it might be slightly overengineered 🤔

[Bisaloo]

At the moment, we partially address this issue via GitHub new feature for organisation-wide required workflows.

The main issue is that it only works for workflows triggered on PRs. I am hoping that in the future, they will expand it to workflows with other triggers.

EDIT 04/2024: Organization-wide required workflows have been deprecated by GitHub and replaced by a feature only available to paying customers.

[Bisaloo]

Otherwise, just as a reminder, the carpentries have implemented their own solution in the workbench: https://github.com/carpentries/workbench-template-md/blob/673111bdc254f62693e78c025036b37a35ab05b7/.github/workflows/update-workflows.yaml

[Bisaloo]

At the moment, I'm not completely certain we will manage to find a solution that works for everything. The best way forward may to rely on dedicated solutions for the different aspects:

• pkgdown template package: https://github.com/epiverse-trace/epiversetheme
• a centrally managed pkgdown deployment workflow, as done by rOpenSci
• ...

Another option I have considered in the past: https://github.com/krlmlr/actions-sync