Enhancements to README.Rmd

[bahadzie]

• Additional Config variables added to DESCRIPTION
• render_readme.yml workflow reads additional config
• README.Rmd updated with additional variables

[Bisaloo]

Thanks for the PR!

I like the idea of automating more the README content but I'm not sure this PR is going in the right direction:

• While it is allowed to use Config/ in DESCRIPTION for custom config params, I think we should still try to not go too much beyond standards (whether official of de facto community standards) and create a bunch of new fields just for Epiverse.
• There is value to put it in DESCRIPTION rather than README.Rmd only in the case these fields are re-used in more than one file, which would not be the case here.
• Since these fields are not standard, I'm afraid it would create confusion for developers about where to look when they want to update, e.g., their package lifecycle in the README. There is a difficult balance to maintain between automation and not having too many ad-hoc processes. I feel we are already generally tilting a bit too much on the side of automation, at the expense of following usual processes and I believe this PR is definitely pushing the cursor too far.

One alternative to what you're proposing would be to:

• Have a separate config file but it seems a bit overkill and cumbersome
• Specify these values in README.Rmd, either as rmarkdown parameters, or as variables at the start of the document.

What do you think?

On a tangential note, I would be in favour of removing the "developed at ..." paragraph, which doesn't seem very useful since we already have standard practices and quality control throughout the project. But I can open a separate issue for this.

[Bisaloo]

Closing this PR as it's going stale. Feel free to follow up in a new issue.