[Rd] Creating a reference manual during R CMD build

[Dan Tenenbaum]

I'd like to have a way to create reference manuals during R CMD build
(and have them go in the build/ directory of the resulting package
tarball), whether or not any of my Rd files have \Sexpr macros in
them.

It seems like there are a couple of ways to suppress the building of
manuals during R CMD build: 1) using --no-manual and 2) putting
BuildManual: no in DESCRIPTION, but there are no corresponding ways to
force a reference manual to be built during R CMD build.

I know the manual is produced during R CMD check, but for the purposes
of putting together the Bioconductor website, it is simpler if the
manual is creating during build and then extracted from the source
tarball later when we propagate newly built packages to our website.
If we instead use the manuals produced during R CMD check, it's
possible that the package and manual can get out of sync.

Is this something that can be added?

I'd prefer for it to be a command-line switch to R CMD build (such as
--force-build-manual) rather than a package-level metadata item in the
DESCRIPTION file, because I want manuals built for all Bioconductor
packages without having to worry whether I've added the appropriate
line to the DESCRIPTION file.

Thanks very much,
Dan