[R-pkgs] Introducing the makeit package

[Arni Magnusson]

Dear R community,

Just a quick note about a new package on CRAN called makeit. Yesterday, I
added a vignette and released as 1.0.1:
https://cran.r-project.org/package=makeit
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/makeit/vignettes/makeit.html

It provides a simple but powerful function make() that works the same way
as GNU Make. In short, it runs an R script if underlying files have
changed, otherwise it does nothing. The first example in the vignette is:
  make("analysis.R", "input.dat", "output.dat")
The second example involves three scripts:
  make("01_model.R", "data.dat", "results.dat")
  make("02_plots.R", "results.dat", c("plots/A.png", "plots/B.png"))
  make("03_tables.R", "results.dat", c("tables/A.csv", "tables/B.csv"))

For R workflows, it can provide the same functionality as GNU Make but with
fewer software requirements in terms of software installed and system path.
The make calls() can be grouped together in a dedicated script, called
something like _make.R, or conveniently called from within scripts to
decide whether a certain part of the analysis needs to be (re)run or not.

Any feedback is appreciated, via email or GitHub issues
<https://github.com/arni-magnusson/makeit>.

Best regards,
Arni

P.S. I originally wanted to call the package simply 'make', but was
politely informed by the CRAN Team that this could mess with their
extensive makefile infrastructure. So there we have it, makeit :)

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