Creating litr

Note: If you are looking to use the litr package, please visit the litr website here, where you’ll be able to learn about the package. If you are interested in how litr is made, you are in the right place.

Background

The litr R package allows one to write R packages using literate programming. The developers of litr are believers in literate programming and so, quite naturally, want to use literate programming to develop litr. For obvious reasons, we couldn’t use litr before it existed. So we wrote the initial viable version in a standard, non-literate way and released this as v0.0.1. We can think of this as the “base case.” This is the last version that is written in the traditional way. Every subsequent version of litr will be generated using the previous version of litr. In particular, v0.0.2 of litr is functionally equivalent to v0.0.1, but the package is defined in a generating .Rmd file; a call to v0.0.1’s litr::render() outputs the litr package v0.0.2. This all might sound complicated, but one can think of this as how developers of an operating system probably write their code on a computer that is running the previous stable version of the operating system.

How to generate a new version of litr using the previous release

To create a new version of litr, we first install the latest release, then make any desired changes to create-litr.Rmd and then use the installed version’s litr::render() to create the new version:

remotes::install_github("jacobbien/litr-project@*release", subdir = "litr")
litr::render("create-litr/index.Rmd")

In the above code, @*release stands for the latest release. For example, at the time of creating version 0.0.2, this would be v0.0.1.

This will generate the new version of litr along with this bookdown. From there, you can build/install as you would for any other package. For checking the package, use

devtools::check("litr", document = FALSE)

The document = FALSE prevents devtools from running its version of document() internally, which would overwrite the modifications that litr::document() has made.

For more notes on contributing to litr, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.