[Rd] Precompiled vignette on CRAN

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2010, Felix Schönbrodt wrote:

> Hello,
>
> my package passes R CMD check without any warnings on my local 
> machine (Mac OS), as well as on Uwe Ligges' Winbuilder. On RForge, 
> however, we sometimes run into problems building the Sweave 
> vignettes.

Just 'problems' is not helpful.

> Now here's my question: is it necessary for a CRAN submission that 
> the Sweave vignettes can be compiled on CRAN, or is it possible to 
> provide the (locally compiled) pdf vignette to be included in the 
> package?

This really is a question to ask the CRAN gatekeepers, but people are 
on vacation right now, so I've give some indication of my 
understanding.

What does 'compiled' mean here?  (Run through LaTeX?  Run the R code?) 
There are examples on CRAN of packages which cannot re-make their 
vignettes without external files (e.g. LaTeX style files), or take 
hours (literally) to run the code.  The source package should contain 
the PDF versions of the vignettes as made by the author.

There is relevant advice in 'Writing R Extensions'.

What the people who do the CRAN package checks do get unhappy about 
are packages which fail running the R code in their vignettes, since 
this often indicates a problem in the package which is not exercised 
by the examples nor tests.  This gives a warning, as you will see in 
quite a few CRAN package checks.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595