What's the relationship between targets and tarchetypes?

[hadley]

Help

• I understand and agree to https://books.ropensci.org/targets/help.html.

Description

It's totally possible I've missed some docs somewhere, but I'd love to know more about the relationship between these packages. Do you expect most people will use tarchetypes?

[wlandau]

I designed the interface of targets with target factories in mind (though I originally called them "archetypes") and DSLs. My hope was that third-party packages would contribute target factories to make targets easier to adapt to specific use cases. For example, stantargets helps users create large simulations with Stan models without needing to understand dynamic branching, geotargets makes targets "just work" (TM) with terra raster data.

Static branching, literate programming, etc. naturally sit at the same level: they make targets easier to use, and they naturally decouple from the main package. The goal of tarchetypes is to be a home for this general-purpose syntactic sugar. I do expect most targets users to find it helpful.

[wlandau]

It varies, but most _targets.R files do have a lot of calls to tarchetypes functions.

[Aariq]

Yeah, it's definitely possible to create a targets pipeline without tarchetypes, but there are a few helper functions in tarchetypes I almost always use like tar_plan() and tar_file()

[hadley]

In that case, I think you should consider either moving the most important/most commonly used tarchetype functions to targets, or wherever you show examples show loading both targets and tarchetypes. Otherwise I think it's an unnecessary burden to the new user.

[wlandau]

Mentioning tarchetypes everywhere seems doable. I'd like to keep the current separation between packages because targets already does so much on its own.

[wlandau]

Just updated the help files and manual to mention tarchetypes alongside targets.