[Rd] Dependencies of packages' CHECK....

Allen S. Rout asr at ufl.edu
Wed Sep 2 08:53:16 CEST 2009




I'm working to automate the building of RPM packages for CRAN &c.  In
the process, I'm trying to get a sense of the correct dependencies.

It's my sense that R CMD CHECK is the Right Way to check to see if a
package is built properly.  But according to Writing R Extensions, I
could reasonably expect anything in Suggests or Imports to be used by
CHECK.  In RPM parlance, this turns all of those packages into a
'build requires'.

In other words, to check properly, I need to treat Suggests and
Imports as Depends.

This is a short road to -lots- of installed packages. :) ggplot2,
which was the initial itch I was trying to scratch, 'Depends' only on
R.  But if I have to recursively expand according to these 'build
requires', I need 63 packages.  And more painfully, I have to leave
CRAN and go grok Bioconductor.  Yow.


So: does this seem silly, or is that just The Way It is? 


- Allen S. Rout



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