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

[Simon Urbanek]

Allen,

On Sep 2, 2009, at 2:53 , Allen S. Rout wrote:

> 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?
>

Think about it - if you want to check all the functionality properly,  
you have to install all packages. If you omit some of them, the  
functionality related to those packages clearly cannot be tested even  
if it's just in the conditional suggests branch. You can decide to run  
checks without forcing suggests (see _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_) at the  
risk of not checking the advanced functionality - that's up to you,  
but you'll be skipping parts of the code.

However, as a binary maintainer, you'll have to install all CRAN and  
parts of BioC anyway, so in practice this is not an issue at all.

Cheers,
Simon