[Rd] .Rbuildignore {was: ... upgrading an R (WINDOWS) installation ..}

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 7/6/05, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> >>>>> "Gabor" == Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>
> >>>>>     on Wed, 6 Jul 2005 08:24:49 -0400 writes:
> 
>  .......................
>  .......................
> 
>    Gabor> I have cleaned up my batch files (somewhat) and posted them to
>    Gabor> CRAN. See my recent post:
>    Gabor> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2005-July/073400.html
> 
>    Gabor> If any of this functionality could migrate to R
>    Gabor> itself that would be great.
> 
>    ........
> 
> 
>    Gabor> 2. Also if Rcmd CHECK and Rcmd INSTALL were to
>    Gabor> process .Rbuildignore like Rcmd BUILD does then
>    Gabor> makepkg.bat would not have to do a build first.
> 
> No!  {We have been here before, and I had explained before that}
> this is really undesired:  ".Rbuildignore" should contain what is
> ignored by build, but not by "check".
> It does make sense to have extra code and / or checks for 'R CMD check'
> that I as package developer want to run, but that are
>  -- too time consuming
>  -- too platform specific
>  -- ......
> to be run during the daily checks on CRAN (e.g.) /
> to be run by others at all.
> 
> {And BTW, AFAIK,  'Rcmd' is now `somewhat deprecated' in favor
>  of "R CMD" since the latter is portable }
> 
> --
> Martin
> 


I think its too heavy handed an approach.  This should be up to the package
developer via a switch.  I like to put partially written code and other things
not intended for distribution in .Rbuildignore and don't want them checked or
installed until I move them out of .Rbuildignore.  That makes it
possible to keep
everything together.  Without this one must 1. keep them elsewhere
(which I am considering as an alternate approach to what I do now although 
it would be a shame) or else 2. write batch files (which I have
written for XP) to do
a prebuild every time one does a check or install.  

One annoying aspect of R CMD is the requirement for capitalization.  Maybe
that's ok on UNIX but on Windows one is used to using upper and lower
case interchangeably.  Its also annoying to have to write two words instead of
one for a frequently issued command.   At any rate I always call it through
my Rcmd.bat batch file so its not really an issue for me.