Staged.deps improvements and changes

[nikolas-burkoff]

From here https://github.com/insightsengineering/coredev-tasks/issues/137#issuecomment-1063891293

FYI @dinakar29 @pawelru @waddella @gmbecker

There could be improvements to the workflow - for example:

• Not needing packages to know about their downstream repos
• Turning off the consistency check on PRs and have them on integration tests only
• Having automated PRs which enforce consistency
• Refactor to use available_packages approach and let R work out dependencies
• Not needing the yaml files (e.g. having a central list of packages)
• Replace staged.deps with something else entirely

Feel free to add thoughts below and Pawel/Dinakar can spin any out into issues for refinement and adding into increments

[nikolas-burkoff]

It's worth looking at the staged.deps backlog to see if anything there would be useful to do e.g. openpharma/staged.dependencies#159

[danielinteractive]

Thanks @nikolas-burkoff for collecting these. I very much agree with bullet 1 - not needing packages to know about their downstream repos. Currently I am adding one new package which has 8 upstream dependencies and therefore I need to adjust the yaml files of 8 repos which means 8 additional PRs, manually created.

As a probably less complex change, I would be very grateful for a tool in staged.dependencies that would modify the 8 yaml files in the 8 repos automatically, locally on disk assuming I have all of them cloned (or clone them otherwise), maybe even creating PRs but I could also do that still manually.