[Rd] CRAN binary packages (was problem with R installation package)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 10/01/2012 08:16, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> Jeroen Ooms<jeroenooms at gmail.com>
>>>>>>      on Mon, 9 Jan 2012 13:56:44 -0800 writes:
>
>      >  Hi Regis,
>
>      >  As you can see on the cran page of your package, no binaries have been build
>      >  yet for windows or osx. This can take a couple of days, you have to be
>      >  patient. For now you can install your package from source using:
>
>      >  install.packages("G2Sd", type="source")
>
>      >  ps: This is a question for the r-help mailing list, not r-devel.
>
> Yes, indeed!
>
> Martin Maechler

Except that for Windows binaries packages, people are asked in several 
places (including the @ReadMe and the rw-FAQ) not to ask about them on 
R-help, and for Mac binary packages only R-sig-mac is possibly appropriate.

There are only a handful of people who could do anything about binary 
packages, and they are very busy people and probably only skim R-help at 
most.  If there really is a problem not explained by impatience or the 
results on the CRAN log page at 
http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary.html it would be best 
to contact them directly: but please check carefully that there is not 
yet an explanation on e.g. R-sig-mac.

The whole CRAN process is running close to its human and machine 
resource limits: there are plans afoot to ease some of the pressures, 
but they too need resources to design and implement.

It would help a lot if people would follow the checklist in 'Writing R 
Extensions' and the policies linked from 
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/index.html, and in particular not 
submit too-frequent updates and submit tarballs that check cleanly and 
have been checked on win-builder.  And definitely: send a submission 
email mentioning the package in the subject line.

Slightly off-subject (but applied to Regis' submission):  CRAN is 
nowadays taking some NOTEs as more serious, so e.g.

- new submissions are required to have a NAMESPACE file and updates will 
get nagged to add one.

- packages are expected not to call C/C++ assert, abort, exit or FORTRAN 
stop, so please address that before submission.  (The reason this is 
still a NOTE is that there are false positives on some platforms: check 
on Linux if at all possible.)


-- 
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