RFC: Migration to R 4.0

[zkamvar]

During the June Maintainer meeting, we asked for comments and experiences with the migration to R 4.0 so that we could create guidance for maintainers and instructors. We have drafted a short blog post (carpentries/carpentries.org#830) to be released next week (2020-08-03) that describes our recommendations for migration. You can find a preview of the blog post here. Please look over the blog posts and make comments by 2020-07-30 so that we can incoroporate any changes before the post goes live.

To help identify the differences between R 3.6 and R 4.0, I have run this lesson in both versions and posted the results that show the differences in output chunks and entire markdown files.

[Teebusch]

Issue can be closed since the deadline for commenting on the blog post has passed.
I went through the diffs provided by @zkamvar - they show that character columns in the data are not automatically converted to factors anymore. This is already tracked by a couple of other issues here, so no need to keep this one open, I think.

[zkamvar]

Ultimately, it's up to the maintainers of this repo. My instinct would be to close this issue once the lesson itself is compliant with R 4.0.

[Teebusch]

Ultimately, it's up to the maintainers of this repo. My instinct would be to close this issue once the lesson itself is compliant with R 4.0.

The issue is about a "request for comment (RFC)" on a blog post that was released in July, not about compatibility with R >4.0. Regarding the latter, there are a handful of more or less general issues to keep track of it (see for example #608, #609).
But of course it is up to the maintainers. I'm just trying to point out an issue that seems to serve no purpose.

[fmichonneau]

I agree the other issues are tracked elsewhere