Use renv for GHA

[jthompson-arcus]

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[jthompson-arcus]

@LDSamson full disclosure: I don't really know how r-lib/actions/setup-r-dependencies fully interacts with renv. I have had issues on other projects when using the public PPM instead of the repo specified in renv.lock. Some of these issues are hidden because of the package installation cache and don't show up until you add a new package with your snapshot date.

Also, I feel like r-lib/actions/setup-renv must be doing something different than the generic setup dependencies. Otherwise, why have two?

[LDSamson]

That interaction is a bit confusing for me as well. I think setup-r-dependencies does not use the renv.lock file to install exact versions. But I think it uses the standard local renv library storage, so it will install from there first if a package is available (at least that is my guess).

Better to use one I think indeed. I used setup-r-dependencies in addition to setup-renv as a (inefficient) way to install additional dependencies (e.g. covr), but these are now included in the full renv lockfile profile so what you propose here should be better I think.

Also, it's probably better to merge GHA workflow changes to main as well. No need to update the version I think since the actual code itself is not changing. What do you think?

[jthompson-arcus]

It is also not hard to just install a package if it's needed in the GHA. To me it makes more sense to be testing the package in the theoretical environment it is designed to be ran in. We can of course reconsider if we want to release on CRAN or we expect people to be downloading directly from GitHub as opposed to forking/cloning the project.

I'm not so concerned about merging it to main by itself. We can but I don't really see it as a value add. More important on the development side of things.