[Rd] Vignette questions

[Yihui Xie]

If R-forge gives the warning, it is likely to be their configuration
problem (they may be running R CMD check on the original source
directory instead of the tarball), so it is better to report to
R-forge admins directly.

I believe Terry is correct and it is a better practice *not* to put
PDF vignettes under version control when they can be automatically
generated.

If vignettes are too complicated, I would suggest not to use vignettes
in a package at all. You can put a fake vignette in the package and
point to the real vignette elsewhere. You may see my knitr package for
example: http://cran.r-project.org/package=knitr I have a dozen of
real "vignettes" but they are not under ./inst/doc/ but under
./inst/examples/. They will not take CRAN any time to check or build,
but I can use them to check if my package works fine on them locally.
After I release a new version to CRAN, I build PDF vignettes and
upload to Github (https://github.com/yihui/knitr/downloads) so users
who do not want to build by themselves can download them directly.

So l'd like to propose to free CRAN from the burdensome tasks of
checkings if you can do it by yourself:
http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/vignette/

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert902 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Now I am not sure if I am confused or if you missed the "if it cannot be
> built by R-forge and CRAN" part of my sentence. I understand that this is
> done automatically by R CMD build for vignettes that can be built on all, or
> most, R platforms. In the situation where R CMD build on R-forge will fail,
> or not result in a complete vignette pdf, I think it is necessary to put a
> good  pdf in inst/doc in order to get a build on R-forge that can be
> submitted to CRAN. That is, in situations like:
>
>  -the vignette requires databases or drivers not generally available
>  -the vignette (legitimately) takes forever to run
>  -the vignette requires a cluster
>
> I am now wondering what the recommended practice is. What I have been doing,
> which I thought was the recommended practice, is to put the vignette Rnw
> (Stex) file in vignettes/ and put a pdf, constructed on a machine that has
> appropriate resources, into inst/doc.  Is that the recommended way to
> proceed?
>
> Related, some have commented that they put a pdf in inst/doc and then leave
> out the vignette Rnw file to avoid error messages. Is the discouraged or
> encouraged?
>
> Paul
>