Create 2024-06-13_AMER.md

Author: hturner

office_hours/2024-06-13_AMER.md

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+# Welcome to the R Contributor Office Hour (AMER)!
+2024-06-13
+
+## Useful links
+
+ * R Development Guide: https://contributor.r-project.org/rdevguide/ 
+ * R's Bugzilla: https://bugs.r-project.org 
+ * R Project Weblate server: https://translate.rx.studio/projects/r-project 
+ * R sources - SVN repo: https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/ 
+ * GitHub mirror: https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/ 
+ * GitHub Codespace (R Dev Container) https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-env 
+ * R-devel mailing list archives: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/, searchable GitHub repo: https://github.com/MichaelChirico/r-mailing-list-archive/tree/master/r-devel 
+ * Minutes from previous office hours: https://github.com/r-devel/rcontribution/tree/main/office_hours 
+ * Annotated list of bugs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bhfPIJQXeKpydigMH79FKIkdHO9NxlBSB_bTRoCFnPY/edit#gid=0
+  
+## Keeping in contact
+
+Twitter: https://twitter.com/R_Contributors  
+Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@R_Contributors  
+Slack: https://contributor.r-project.org/slack  
+
+## Facilitators
+
+Heather Turner 
+Gabe Becker
+
+## Participants
+
+Atharva Shirdhankar
+
+## Discussion
+
+### Progress on R Dev Container
+
+Heather shared her attempts to configure the container to open a customised welcome page that enables people to open the mini tutorials inside VSCode 
+
+* The default of a README in preview mode has the disadvantage that clicking links replaces the content in the preview window, so you lose the index to the tutorials and other help pages.
+* Tried various solutions and currently best solution is to have a dummy README, while opening a separate WELCOME.md. Not ideal, as the README is not needed but removing README means that several VS Code welcome pages are opened instead, which is even worse as you get files in multiple windows.
+
+Shared the in-progress documentation (https://contributor.r-project.org/r-dev-env/) and highlighted what is new from the previous version. One big change is support for multiple builds of R.
+
+Some notes from Gabe:
+
+* Need to be careful not to compound patches. Ideally have a clean checkout for each patch
+  * We cover this to some extent in the Updating R Sources section, where we encourage people to review their local changes before updating R
+* Gabe's workflow:
+  * Always have r-devel-raw (unmodified)
+  * Copy r-devel-raw to another location before modifying
+* For performance style patch, will always want at least two development versions (control/test)
+
+Future work on R Dev Container:
+
+* GitPod version, so less dependent on GitHub Codespaces
+* RStudio Server as alternative to R terminal in VS Code
+* Support for working with r-svn git repo
+
+Notes on git workflow
+
+* Gabe's workflow:
+    * only put modified files in separate git repository
+    * copy these to a full checkout of the r-svn repo to make a PR for testing/review
+* Working with git may make the container too complex - will need to connect to GitHub, have both git and svn repos in the container etc. Does not meet objective of keeping things simple for new contributors!
+    * Perhaps add doc/link to R Dev guide for more on git workflow
+    * Perhaps svn patch could be applied to a full checkout of the r-svn repo outside of the Dev Container - is there way to do this using the patch file, or do you need to copy over modified files?