D4Science Infrastructure

We currently have to sets of R packages lists, one for the Prototyping Environments (the VREs with SAI) and one for the Production Environments (the VREs without SAI). The RStudio machines retrieve the packages lists from the production set, but this may cause some inconsistencies when a user is writing his code using RStudio in a Prototyping VRE and then publishes it onto DataMiner using SAI. In fact, he might be able to run his script inside RStudio without errors, while encountering issues once the algorithm is in DataMiner, because one or more of the packages he uses are not actually installed on the machines. In a perfect world the user wouldn't forget to include all the dependencies in SAI before the publication step so to have them automatically installed on the machines, but we do not live in a perfect world and if this happens we automatically have the aforementioned inconsistencies.

This ticket is meant to highlight such issue and find a solution together.

One possible way to tackle the problem consists in a distinction between RStudio machines, having the ones behind Prototyping Environments point to the Prototyping packages list, while the ones behind Production Environments points to the other set. Is it a viable escamotage? Do you have any other ideas?