EPSRC RSE Fellowship (2021-2026)

Sustainability & EDI in the R Project

R Project Sprint 2023

48 in person (not all pictured), 7 online.

Who came?

25/40 non core developers self-identified from underrepresented groups

Activities

• Translation: translation platform admin, documentation, message translation
• Documentation: triaging and working on bug reports
• Bug fixes/new functionality:
  • Accessibility, e.g. logging base graphics
  • Low-level, e.g. rng overhead optimization
  • Packages, e.g. improving messages sent to CRAN maintainers
  • Statistics, e.g. enhancing sample.int for unequal probability sampling
  • Graphics, e.g. adding support for “#RGB” colours in R (in addition to “#RRGGBB”)

Translation

~2000 new/updated messages translations across 14 languages

Bugs

R Dev Days

• 1-day versions of the R Project Sprint
• 9 events as satellites to R conferences:
  • 2 x useR! (Austria, USA)
  • 2 x Shiny in Production (UK)
  • London satRdays (UK)
  • posit::conf(2024) (USA)
  • LatinR 2024 (online)
  • RencontresR 2025 (France)
  • RSECon25 (UK)

Diversity at R Dev Days

Upcoming Events

• R Dev Day @ Australia 2025, Fri 21 Nov: pretix.eu/r-contributors/r-dev-day-oz-25/
  • Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth in person
  • Remote (close time zones best)
  • 3 Melbourne tickets left (as of 15:00 AEDT today!)
• R Dev Day @ NZ 2025, Tue-Wed 16-17 Dec: pretix.eu/r-contributors/r-dev-day-nz-25/
  • Auckland in person
  • Remote: Americas or Asia-Pacific
  • Morning Stream, Afternoon Stream, or both!

What Happens at an R Dev Day

• Tasks are prepared as issues on https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-day
• Prior to the event/during kick-off, people flag their interest
• Break-out into small groups for the rest of the day

R Contributor Assets

Also the R Dev Container (containerized development environment).

Contributor Infrastructure Tasks at R Dev Days

• R Contributors website: Combine brand-light and brand-dark into one _brand.yml
  Clare Welsh
• R Dev Guide: Document how to make a feature request
  Isabella Velásquez, Lydia Gibson
• Review r-devel repos for best practices
  Team including Ella Kaye, Simisani Ndaba, Heather Turner
  • List of essential and adviasable practices: github.com/r-devel/repo-best-practices/
  • Implementation ongoing!

R Project Weblate Instance

https://translate.rx.studio: a user-friendly interface for contributing translations

• Package R and C files: errors, messages and warnings
• base (R GUI): text strings in the Windows GUI

Languages tab

27 (written) languages, e.g., Simplified Chinese (73% translated), Indonesian (3% translated)

Translators

Translation Tasks at R Dev Days

• Explore greater use of automatic translations in Weblate
  Gabriela de Lima Marin
  • Later documented in the R Dev Guide by Patricia Loto and Lydia Gibson
• Review translations dashboard and propose improvements
  Team including Riva Quiroga, Patricia Loto, Erika Siregar, Steph Orellana
• Set up for {glossary} package (pkgdown website, precommit, All Contributors)
  Saranjeet Kaur, Riva Quiroga, Simisani Ndaba, Jyoti Bhoga

Translations Dashboard

https://contributor.r-project.org/translations-dashboard/

Plans for Improvement

• Restructure the repository - almost done
• Convert into a Quarto dashboard
• Extract table generation into separate R modules/functions
• Improve data visualization to make it useful for the final users
• Documentation and governance - README, CONTRIBUTORS.md, CODEOWNERS, etc

Tasks related to R Manuals at R Dev Days

R has 5 official manuals: R-intro, R-data, R-admin, R-exts, R-lang, R-ints

• Link R manuals from help pages
  Ella Kaye, Rhian Davies, Claire Welsh
• Add missing information to bibliographic entries
  Team including Fonti Kar, Ella Kaye
• Improve the CSS for the R manuals
  Team including Pao Corrales, Emi Tanaka, Jayani Lakshika, Fonti Kar, Toni Price

Improving CSS: Before

Improving CSS: After

Bug 17835 - Removing master/slave terminology from tcltk (Code)

Team including Erin Hodgess, Ella Kaye

Bug 17835 - Removing master/slave terminology from tcltk (Doc)

Bug 7084 - text(x, y, labels) - recycling problems

Team including Ella Kaye

text() recycles coordinate pairs when there are more labels than points

par(mar = c(5, 4, 0, 0))
plot(1:7); text(1:2, 2:4, LETTERS[1:4])

Bug 7084 - text(x, y, labels) - recycling problems (Code)

if (is.language(labels)) {
    labels <- as.expression(labels)
}

if (length(labels) > (n <- length(x$x)) && n >= 1) {
  labels <- labels[1:n]
  warning("length(labels) > max(length(x), length(y)). labels truncated to length ", n, ".")
}

Bug 7084 - text(x, y, labels) - recycling problems (Doc)

Bug 18674 - tools::toTitleCase() incorrectly capitalizes conjunctions

Team including Shannon Pileggi, Reiko Okamoto

In the following example “and” should not be capitalized:

tools::toTitleCase("pre- and post estimation")

[1] "Pre- And Post Estimation"

Bug 18674 - tools::toTitleCase() incorrectly capitalizes conjunctions (Code)

Bug 18674 - tools::toTitleCase() incorrectly capitalizes conjunctions (Tests)

Bug 18787: Modify glyphFont() so it produces a single font description (Code)

Team including Sherry Zhang, Jayani Lakshika, Stephanie Zimmer

• similar changes for index, family, weight, and style arguments

Bug 18787: Modify glyphFont() so it produces a single font description (Tests)

Bug 18787: Modify glyphFont() so it produces a single font description (TODO)

• Regression test grid/tests/glyphs.R (including checks that output is unchanged, e.g., via {gdiff}).
• Check that the changes do not break {marquee} (or change its output).

Open as issue #68 for R Dev Day @ Australia

Issues related to C code

C code contributions tend to be more complex, but see Ella Kaye’s C for R users talk for R-Ladies Philly for a gentle introduction:

• 3-digit hex colors (R Project Sprint 2023 issue)
• Bug 8934 - Irregularity in stem() display

CRAN-related Tasks at R Dev Days

Fix lost braces NOTE on CRAN packages
Team including Geraldine Gomez and Andrea Gomez Vargas

• PRs submitted for 36 packages (some outside the R Dev Day)

Get Involved

• R Dev Day @ Australia 2025, 21 Nov: pretix.eu/r-contributors/r-dev-day-oz-25/
• R Dev Day @ New Zealand 2025, 16-17 Dec: pretix.eu/r-contributors/r-dev-day-nz-25/
• R Contributor Office hours
  • Thursday 13 Nov, 21:00-22:00 AEDT
  • Thursday 11 Dec, 14:00-15:00 or 21:00-22:00 AEDT
• More support on contributor.r-project.org