I am investigating ways for my group to improve the reproducibility of our analyses. The aim is that reviewers or we in 10 years are able to recompute our results.
My first choice would be containers using Singularity which are basically a SquashFS with all needed files except the Linux kernel. But except our cluster we are working on Windows machines. Our IT does not feel equipped to support Linux VMs on every machine nor do I expect my fellow biologists to reliably keep working inside a container inside a VM instead of circumventing the system because deadline is always looming.
Therefore, my next best idea is copying R Portable inside each project and using renv to keep a dedicated R package library for each project. Additionally, I will set the locale using Sys.setlocale in the .Rprofile of the project. The working directory can be set to the project folder (nessecary so that R loads the .Rprofile and users don't get tempted to use absolute paths) by using relative paths in Windows Shortcuts
The size of the R Portable download is 200MB whereas for example the rocker/r-ver docker image is 260MB. So there seems to be at least roughly the same amount of information available in the computation environment. Does this setup enable me to reproduce our analyses on other Windows machines?
