r-gittargets

In computationally demanding data analysis pipelines, the 'targets' R package (2021, <doi:10.21105/joss.02959>) maintains an up-to-date set of results while skipping tasks that do not need to rerun. This process increases speed and increases trust in the final end product. However, it also overwrites old output with new output, and past results disappear by default. To preserve historical output, the 'gittargets' package captures version-controlled snapshots of the data store, and each snapshot links to the underlying commit of the source code. That way, when the user rolls back the code to a previous branch or commit, 'gittargets' can recover the data contemporaneous with that commit so that all targets remain up to date.