[Rd] declaring package dependencies

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13-09-15 9:58 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
> I've been watching this thread closely and trying not to chime in,
> because as Brian Rowe mentioned about CRAN's mysterious absence in a
> previous reply.

It's no mystery that they don't discuss CRAN policies on this list. 
That's been stated many times.  I don't expect that to change because 
users on this list make stupid jokes about it.

Duncan Murdoch

CRAN is like a ghost in r-devel (or any other mailing
> lists) -- everybody is discussing about it, and nobody has ever seen
> it. Perhaps one day useRs will realize that the rings of Saturn are
> actually composed of the lost discussions about CRAN. (Just kidding.
> No offence. I swear I appreciate the great work of CRAN, and
> rep("thank you, CRAN", 1e6).)
>
> Although this discussion may also contribute to the rings of Saturn, I
> want to emphasize one final point: requests from package authors do
> not necessarily mean more work for CRAN.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
> Web: http://yihui.name
> Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
> 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Matthew Dowle <mdowle <at> mdowle.plus.com> writes:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm a little surprised by this thread.
>>>
>>> I subscribe to the RSS feeds of changes to NEWS (as Dirk mentioned) and
>>> that's been pretty informative in the past :
>>> http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html
>>>
>>> Mainly though, I submit to winbuilder before submitting to CRAN, as the
>>> CRAN policies advise.  winbuilder's R-devel seems to be built daily,
>>> saving me the time. Since I don't have Windows it kills two birds with
>>> one stone.  It has caught many problems for me before submitting to CRAN
>>> and I can't remember it ever not responding in a reasonable time.
>>> http://win-builder.r-project.org/upload.aspx
>>>
>>> I've suggested before that winbuilder could be the mechanism to submit
>>> to CRAN rather than an ftp upload to incoming.  Only if winbuilder
>>> passed OK on R-devel could it then go to a human.   But iirc there was a
>>> technical difficulty preventing this.
>>>
>>> Matthew
>>
>>    I was planning to write a careful e-mail to CRAN suggesting
>> essentially this, and I may yet do so, but for now I'll just chime in
>> and "+1" this.  Yihui Xie made a very similar suggestion sometime
>> last year (I think).  It would seem so much easier for everyone,
>> package maintainers *and* CRAN maintainers, to have an automatic
>> filter of this sort, and I can't figure out any downside other than
>> needing slightly more computer power (which surely must be a reasonable
>> tradeoff for fewer human resources!), *if* having the
>> auto-filter made people sloppier about checking before submitting.
>>     Do you happen to remember what the technical difficulty was?
>> If I were a CRAN maintainer (thank goodness I'm not!), overcoming
>> it would be one of my top priorities ...
>>
>>    Ben Bolker
>
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