Render output in a temp directory, when in an R package #435
Conversation
There was a problem hiding this comment.
In my testing, this works well for files at the top level of an R package like README and NEWS. We'll need to follow up for vignettes, because although the final file is written to the temporary directory, these kinds of files are still getting written to the directory where the vignette lives:
| "quarto.render.rPackageOutputDirectory": { | ||
| "order": 15, | ||
| "scope": "window", | ||
| "type": "boolean", | ||
| "default": true, | ||
| "markdownDescription": "Render output files in a temporary directory, when in an R package." | ||
| }, |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
This is new configuration, so users can turn off this behavior if they prefer:
I want to argue that this should be true by default, because otherwise, R package developers need to add all these output files to both .gitignore and .Rbuildignore.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I would recommend doing a bit of work ahead of time to make sure that this is not going to create other bugs. In an R package, will users mostly preview README.md files and vignettes? In that case, I wonder if the right behavior is to use --output-dir only in these special cases.
Like we discussed, relocating files for an .html target is unlikely to be robust because of things like CSS resource paths; in that case, we tend to recommend to use --output-dir together with embed-resources
There was a problem hiding this comment.
With that said, this is a pain in the neck to test in an automated fashion. It might be good enough to test this by making a mock test harness over at https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli. I can help with that; I think it's prudent to do it. Because quarto-cli won't generally know the ways in which the extension calls quarto render, quarto preview etc, we have a pretty big regression risk unless we do something about it.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
In that case, I wonder if the right behavior is to use
--output-dironly in these special cases.
I'm going to get some more feedback on this from folks, but my current belief is that there are basically no cases where you want to check in generated code such as HTML, libs, etc, for an R package.
The one exception is README.Rmd being rendered to README.md but a) none of that works for people right now because of output: github_document and b) we can encourage them to use devtools::build_readme() for this purpose. If we want to be more forward thinking, we could exclude README.Rmd and README.qmd from this treatment, rather than make a list of files to include for this treatment.
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I'm going to get some more feedback on this from folks, but my current belief is that there are basically no cases where you want to check in generated code such as HTML, libs, etc, for an R package.
I believe that! Really my only concern is that quarto preview itself might break under common use cases in R packages, and I'd hate for us to enable something by default that doesn't work well in these scenarios.
|
This looks good from my end, so feel free to squash+merge it or let me know if you have no further changes to make! |
This PR updates the preview behavior so by default output files go to a temporary directory when the workspace is an R package.