{"action":"closed","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/issues/129","repository_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/issues/129/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/issues/129/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/issues/129/events","html_url":"https://github.com/ropensci/onboarding/issues/129","id":239999408,"number":129,"title":"Presub enquiry: bowerbird","user":{"login":"raymondben","id":6445827,"avatar_url":"https://avatars1.githubusercontent.com/u/6445827?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben","html_url":"https://github.com/raymondben","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/raymondben/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[{"id":405978138,"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/labels/0/presubmission","name":"0/presubmission","color":"1d76db","default":false},{"id":185501572,"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/ropensci/onboarding/labels/package","name":"package","color":"fbca04","default":false}],"state":"closed","locked":false,"assignee":null,"assignees":[],"milestone":null,"comments":7,"created_at":"2017-07-02T09:29:35Z","updated_at":"2017-07-07T23:01:40Z","closed_at":"2017-07-07T23:01:40Z","body":"See https://github.com/AustralianAntarcticDivision/bowerbird\r\n\r\nThis is a data retrieval package, but I'm enquiring as to whether this fits within your desired scope for such packages. Specifically, it facilitates downloading and maintaining a local data repository from one or more third-party data providers. It comes with (at latest count) 50-odd predefined data sources, generally themed around marine and Antarctic environmental data. The basic usage is to define a configuration of one or more sources that you want mirrored locally, then run the synchronisation function on daily or other regular intervals to keep your local copy in sync with the remote masters. Most of the download functionality is achieved by passing calls to `wget` and asking it to mirror the remote source, although a few of the pre-defined sources have more elaborate handlers.\r\n\r\nIt seems to me that this provides a nice complement to existing ropensci packages that provide on-demand retrieval of remote data, e.g. `rerddap`. However --- and hence this enquiry --- you might view it as being in the \"too general\" category described in the onboarding doc (i.e. it's something like a *service* rather than a *source* or *topic*).\r\n\r\nIt is intended to be relatively easy for users to write their own data source configurations (and there are no particular constraints on what those data sources could be --- anything that can be retrieved by `wget`). In that sense the package could certainly be viewed as a \"general\" data retriever. But by the same token, it could be viewed as a scaffold package upon which more themed/targeted data retrieval packages could be built, and so in that context I think it would be a useful addition to the ropensci packageverse.\r\n\r\nThoughts?\r\n\r\nUpdate: @mdsumner reminded me of https://github.com/ropensci/rdataretriever, which is superficially similar. I don't think there's irresolvable overlap, though: rdataretriever seems to be angled towards biodiversity data sets in particular and creating sensible local database structures for them. Bowerbird has no particular thematic orientation (although the pre-packaged definitions are environmental/marine/Antarctic) and simply mirrors remote data locally, without attempting to restructure it. Bowerbird only requires wget (and will install it on Windows if you don't have it) whereas rdataretriever requires the (python) retriever package.\r\n"}}
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