[Rd] testing presence of pdflatex in R CMD check

[Petr Savicky]

The nodes of our cluster do not have pdflatex installed. When
running R CMD check there on a package with no errors in documentation,
then R-2.13.0-alpha and R-2.12.2 report a possible error in Rd files,
while R-2.11.1 did not. The platform is 64 bit CentOS.

The output of

  R CMD check tree_1.0-28.tar.gz

under the above three versions of R contains the following.

R-2.11.1

stderr

  sh: pdflatex: command not found
  sh: latex: command not found

stdout

  * checking for working pdflatex ... NO

R-2.12.2

stderr

  sh: pdflatex: command not found
  Error in texi2dvi("Rd2.tex", pdf = (out_ext == "pdf"), quiet = FALSE,  :
    unable to run 'pdflatex' on 'Rd2.tex'
  Error in running tools::texi2dvi

stdout

  * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
  LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
  This typically indicates Rd problems.
  * checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR
  Re-running with no redirection of stdout/stderr.
  Hmm ... looks like a package
  You may want to clean up by 'rm -rf /tmp/RtmpgnWKRW/Rd2pdf3723367e'

2.13.0-alpha

stderr

  Error in texi2dvi("Rd2.tex", pdf = (out_ext == "pdf"), quiet = FALSE,  :
    pdflatex is not available
  Error in running tools::texi2dvi

stdout

  * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
  LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
  This typically indicates Rd problems.
  * checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR
  Re-running with no redirection of stdout/stderr.
  Hmm ... looks like a package
  You may want to clean up by 'rm -rf /tmp/RtmpQ0WawT/Rd2pdf41481e1'

Is it intentional not to test the presence of pdflatex during R CMD check?

Petr Savicky.