[Rd] Hosting Omegahat package on CRAN?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Hi list!

For a package providing a GUI intended in particular at R newcomers (RcmdrPlugin.temis[1]), I would like to use the Rstem package [2] by Duncan Temple Lang, which is hosted on Omegahat only. This means the package cannot be installed automatically as a dependency, which I can work around by installing the package from my code when the user needs it. But Omegahat does not provide binaries for Mac OS X, and still does not provide Windows binaries for R 3.0. This is a showstopper for my intended audience, as I cannot ask them to install a working build environment.

What is the best solution here? As Rstem does not have any special dependencies other than a C compiler, uploading it on CRAN would magically make all of these issues go away. I could create a package with a different name but the same contents and upload it to CRAN, but this is sub-optimal. I can also integrate Rstem's code into my package, but this is not really better.


FWIW, the same issue exists with ROpenOffice, though it also depends on RCompression, which makes things slightly more complex.


Regards



1: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RcmdrPlugin.temis/
2: http://www.omegahat.org/Rstem/