Automated PRs to CRAN packages

[hturner]

#110 is an ongoing issue to submit PRs to CRAN packages with Rd issues. However, there are over 500 affected packages and it will take some time to work through them all manually.

We could look at two forms of automation here. This second sub-issue is to create a process to semi-automate PRs to CRAN packages. We could create a robot account on GitHub and develop code to automatically fork and clone a repo hosted on GitHub, make the required changes and open a draft PR for human review. The infrastructure should allow for custom code to be added for different changes to be made and be extensible to cover other common code hosting platforms in future.

The process could be tested with the script from #131, or a simpler script e.g. adding a value to the Bug Reports field of the DESCRIPTION for a package.

[hturner]

@villegar and @hpeaker started work on a automated workflow for fixing the "Lost braces" NOTE on CRAN packages, in the r-devel/auto_fix_cran_notes repo.

To keep the scope manageable for a Dev Day, I suggest refining this code to develop a workflow to fix errors that the auto_fix_cran_notes/categorise_notes.R categorises as itemize. This is the case that the team have already worked on, so the task would be to further develop the code:

• Complete the workflow to check out a package that needs fixing, apply the required changes and open a PR
  • The current code just clones the repo, but in most cases, people will not have permissions to make a direct PR. Instead, contributors will need to fork the repo, this might be done with usethis::create_from_github()
• Refactor the code to make it easier to adapt for different fixes
  • Separate steps into reusable functions that can be called by scripts. E.g. put functions in an R subdirectory, that can then be loaded into example scripts in a scripts subdirectory with

    helpers <- list.files("R", pattern = "\\.R$", full.names = TRUE)
    lapply(helpers, source)

  • Document functions with roxygen-style comments
  • Update README with overview of package contents and how to use

Possible extensions

• Consider how to adapt the workflow for errors of type enumerate. Ideally the workflow would be sufficiently modular that this fix could be applied on its own, or in addition to the itemize fix.
• Convert the repo into an R package.