[Rd] r-forge build failure bafflement

[Ben Bolker]

  I am attempting to build a package on r-forge and running into a
weird error.  I have been in correspondence with the R-forge admins
and am turning to r-devel on the remote chance that someone might have
a guess as to what is going wrong or a suggestion about further
diagnostics/experiments I could try ...

  The package seems to build fine on my system(s) with

R CMD build --compact-vignettes --resave-data=best pkg

(these are the R-forge build arguments, according to the r-forge admins)

 -- I've tried it with R-devel on Linux-32 and R 2.14.2 on MacOS-64.

The build log (basically identical across linux64/win64/macos64) is as
follows:

--------------
Thu Mar 29 20:15:21 2012: Building tarball for package glmmADMB (SVN
revision 204)
using R version 2.14.2 (2012-02-29) ...

* checking for file 'glmmADMB/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'glmmADMB':
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* looking to see if a 'data/datalist' file should be added
* re-saving image files
Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called 'glmmADMB'
Execution halted
Run time: 0.51 seconds.
----------

  so apparently the package is failing because it doesn't exist (!!)
  I originally thought this was a circular dependency problem, because
glmmADMB and coefplot2 (another r-forge package) depended on each
other, but I have (at least for now) removed glmmADMB's coefplot2
dependency.  As far as I can tell there are *no* packages on r-forge
that depend on/suggest/import glmmADMB.

a1 <- available.packages(contriburl=
   contrib.url("http://r-forge.r-project.org"))
> rownames(a1)["glmmADMB" %in% a1[,"Suggests"]]
character(0)
> rownames(a1)["glmmADMB" %in% a1[,"Depends"]]
character(0)
> rownames(a1)["glmmADMB" %in% a1[,"Imports"]]
character(0)

The perhaps-relevant parts of the DESCRIPTION file:
=========
BuildVignettes: no
Description: Fits mixed-effects models using a variety of distributions
Imports: stats, nlme
Depends: R (>= 2.13), methods, MASS, R2admb
Suggests: lattice, lme4, lme4.0, coda, mlmRev, scapeMCMC, ggplot2,
bbmle, pscl, knitr, car
=====

  The only other thing I can think of is backing up a few SVN
revisions and seeing whether I can get back to a working version, but
I'd like to see if I can get it fixed by moving forward rather than
backward ...


  For anyone who is intrigued and wants to investigate farther:

http://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=847
http://r-forge.r-project.org/scm/?group_id=847

  cheers
   Ben Bolker