Add content on best practice for reproducibility?

[aeturrell]

Given the twitter conversation that some of us participated in today, and the need for reproducibility in projects, should we add a section/page on best practice for reproducibility or would that be out of scope? Personally, I think it could be really useful for site users but I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts.

I guess we might want to cover:

• reproducing a set of packages (eg pip freeze > requirements.txt or conda env export --from-history -f environment.yml and the R equivalents)

• reproducing the execution sequence of a series of scripts and commands (eg using, and perhaps drawing, a makefile or using a tool like ploomber)

• reproducing the operating system (Docker)

• anything else?

We could draw on the relevant sections of The Turing Way if necessary.

[grantmcdermott]

I like it.

RE: first bullet point. For R it would be renv (with optional extras like RSPM or bpsm for system binaries). Julia does a great job out of the box with its package manager. Stata is a little more complicated — base Stata comes with built-in backwards compatibility, but you'd typically bundle any user-provided libs with your project. We could link to Julian Reif's excellent guide.

Docker is maybe a bigger lift b/c of system deps and installation idiosyncrasies (cough Windows cough). Maybe just point people to relevant tutorials?