[R-pkg-devel] My package CECPfuns on github has branches main and gh-pages badly out of synch

[Chris Evans]

Sorry for a very trivial issue at one edge of R package management: use 
of github.

My package (https://github.com/cpsyctc/CECPfuns) is mostly very simple 
as I am entirely self-taught as a statistics user and R programmer and 
as I am ageing!   (I was a fairly good psychiatrist and psychotherapist 
and still am a pretty productive researcher I think!)

The package is mostly aimed at people like me who find R amazingly 
helpful but who sometimes struggle with the documentation, warnings and 
error messages. Hence a lot of it is trivial but is trying to wrap 
things up to give end users reasonable help, the odd vignette (not 
enough currently) and good input sanity checking and non-geek worded 
warnings and errors.

OK enough of the apologies.  I have always found git and github in the 
"dark arts" side of things but I thought that pushing my commits (from 
within a package worked on locally in Rstudio) was working for updating 
the package and mostly I thought the evidence was that it was.  Clearly 
I wasn't checking well enough.

At some point I clearly created a gh-pages branch and I think that was 
to get github to create the user friendly html page(s) about the 
package.  Reading the web now and trying to separate up to date from old 
advice from out of date advice I think this is no longer necessary and I 
could get the html from the main branch and ditch the gh-pages branch.

However, as the subject line says, I now see that the two branches are 
badly out of synch. Github says that main is my default branch and 
gh-pages an active branch and at the moment both say they were last 
updated six hours ago which was when I last pushed changes up.  However, 
gh-pages says its behind:ahead count is 100:31 which sounds nasty and I 
don't think my use of pkgdown and things in /doc and /docs are updating 
correctly.

Having scoured the web for help on this I am rattled and reaching out 
for hel. As I say above, I think using gh-pages is no longer necessary 
and I would like to synchronise the two branches if that is possible 
then delete the gh-pages branch and then get my courage up and try to 
get back to understanding how best to document things with github pages 
and with pkgdown.

I know this is very small beer against the fascinating things I read 
here but I hope someone can look at my mess and point me to safe ways 
forward.

Thanks in advance and more generally, thanks for the list which is, 
though often way beyond what I need, always educational for me.

Chris

-- 
Chris Evans (he/him)
Visiting Professor, UDLA, Quito, Ecuador
CORE site: http://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk 
<https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/>
Other work web site: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/
Personal site: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/