R: Utilities for Building and Checking Add-on Packages

PkgUtils {utils}

R Documentation

Utilities for Building and Checking Add-on Packages

Description

Utilities for checking whether the sources of an R add-on package work correctly, and for building a source package from them.

Usage

R CMD check [options] pkgdirs
R CMD build [options] pkgdirs

Arguments

`pkgdirs`	a list of names of directories with sources of R add-on packages. For `check` these can also be the filenames of compressed `tar` archives with extension ‘.tar.gz’, ‘.tgz’, ‘.tar.bz2’ or ‘.tar.xz’.
`options`	further options to control the processing, or for obtaining information about usage and version of the utility.

Details

R CMD check checks R add-on packages from their sources, performing a wide variety of diagnostic checks.

R CMD build builds R source tarballs. The name(s) of the packages are taken from the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files and not from the directory names. This works entirely on a copy of the supplied source directories.

Use R CMD foo --help to obtain usage information on utility foo, notably the possible options.

The defaults for some of the options to R CMD build can be set by environment variables _R_BUILD_RESAVE_DATA_ and _R_BUILD_COMPACT_VIGNETTES_: see ‘Writing R Extensions’. Many of the checks in R CMD check can be turned off or on by environment variables: see Chapter ‘Tools’ of the ‘R Internals’ manual.

By default R CMD build uses the "internal" option to tar to prepare the tarball. An external tar program can be specified by the R_BUILD_TAR environment variable. This may be substantially faster for very large packages, and can be needed for packages with long path names (over 100 bytes) or very large files (over 8GB): however, the resulting tarball may not be portable.

R CMD check by default unpacks tarballs by the internal untar function: if needed an external tar command can be specified by the environment variable R_INSTALL_TAR: please ensure that it can handle the type of compression used on the tarball. (This is sometimes needed for tarballs containing invalid or unsupported sections, and can be faster on very large tarballs. Setting R_INSTALL_TAR to ‘⁠tar.exe⁠’ has been needed to overcome permissions issues on some Windows systems.)

Note