[Rd] Conditional "Suggests"

[Friedrich Leisch]

>>>>> On Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:30:24 -0700,
>>>>> Geoff Jentry (GJ) wrote:

  > On Mon, 11 Apr 2011, Hadley Wickham wrote:
  >>> To me this reads as being in the wheelhouse of what 'Suggests' is supposed
  >>> to imply, as per the R Extensions manual.  The problem here is that if PkgB
  >>> is put down as 'Suggests', it is required for R CMD check to pass which
  >>> seems to defeat the purpose of this exercise a bit.
  >> No, because R CMD check is only run by the developer, not the user.

  > It's not only run by the developer, it's also run by CRAN.  The situation 
  > might happen where for a particular platform (e.g. Windows) that PkgB 
  > doesn't exist.  It'd be nice to be able to avoid a situation where PkgA 
  > can't exist for that platform simply because PkgB - which isn't even 
  > necessarily required for PkgA to be used - doesn't exist for it.

That is not the case, the checks will only get a NOTE that PkgB
doesn't exist. E.g., my package flexclust suggests multicore, which is
not available for windows. Still both live happily on CRAN, and of
course there is a windows version of flexclust available from CRAN.

Best,
Fritz