[Rd] build time dependency

[Seth Falcon]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Romain Francois
<romain.francois at dbmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Uwe,
>
> I think you are supposed to do this kind of sequence:
>
> R CMD roxygen yourRoxygenablePackage
> R CMD build yourRoxygenablePackage_roxygen
>
> ... but I don't like this because what you upload to cran is not the actual
> source but somethingalready pre-processed. (This also applies to packages
> shipping java code, most people just compile the java code on their machine
> and only supply a jar of compiled code, but that's another story I suppose
> ...)
>
> I'd prefer the roxygenation to be part of the standard build/INSTALL system,
> so my plan is to write configure and configure.win which would call
> roxygenize to generate Rd.

I can appreciate the desire to make the "true" sources available.  At
the same time, I think one should very carefully consider the expense
of external dependencies on a package.

One could view doc generation along the same lines as configure script
generation -- a compilation step that can be done once instead of by
all those who install and as a result reduce the depencency burden of
those wanting to install the package.  Configure scripts are almost
universally included pre-built in distribution source packages so that
users do not need to have the right version of autoconf/automake.

In other words, are you sure you want to require folks to install
roxygen (or whatever) in order to install your package? Making it easy
to do so is great, but in general if you can find a way to reduce
dependencies and have your package work, that is better. :-)

+ seth

-- 
Seth Falcon | @sfalcon | http://userprimary.net/user