[Rd] FOSS licence with BuildVignettes: false

[Claudia Beleites]

Hi there,

Am Tue, 17 Sep 2013 09:25:14 +0100
schrieb Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>:

> On 16/09/2013 15:49, Paul Gilbert wrote:
> > On 13-09-16 05:19 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> > ...
> >> Yes, and I could see really rare circumstances where vignette
> >> building takes a long time and the maintainer decides not to build
> >> vignettes as part of the daily checks.
> > ...

I have two vignettes that I build externally because the
required data sets are largish (20 and 40 MB zipped), so I provide them
for download on hyperSpec's home page but do not want to burden CRAN
with them. Instructions how to get that data to build the vignette
yourself are one of the first points in the vignette. 

I do /not/ have BuildVignettes: FALSE but a Makefile that
turns of pdflatex for these two only, and dummy .Rnw files that provide
just the appropriate \VignetteIndex etc. entries.

IMHO that is a perfectly reasonable option for FOSS packages, and while
it makes it my responsibility to check the vignette building, a
Makefile for preparing the package takes care of that as well. I can
also make sure that both data and real vignette source are available
there.

For an upcoming spectral unmixing package, however, I'd like to include
a vignette dealing with the cuprite AVIRIS data set (remote sensing
data, a standard data set used on many publications for spectral
unmixing) that can be downloaded from the NASA
(http://aviris.jpl.nasa.gov/data/free_data.html).

Is it acceptable to have a vignette that points to yet another data
source (which is out of my control)?

(I think this question goes mainly to Brian and the author of the part
of the manual cited by Ben).

Best,

Claudia




> >
> > I thought 'BuildVignettes: FALSE' only turns of assembling the pdf,
> > all the code is still run.  I don't think that would affect the
> > time very much. Am I wrong (again)?
> 
> Yes, as the code is run again to re-build the vignettes.
> 
> The main use of BuildVignettes: FALSE is when building the vignettes 
> requires unusual facilities -- presumably not R ones as it does not
> turn off running the code.  However, for a FOSS package, the means to 
> re-build the vignettes has to available to others, and CRAN therefore 
> tries it so see if all the sources are available.  Almost every time
> we uncover some problem with the sources and stale vignette PDFs.



-- 
Claudia Beleites, Chemist
Spectroscopy/Imaging
Institute of Photonic Technology 
Albert-Einstein-Str. 9
07745 Jena
Germany

email: claudia.beleites at ipht-jena.de
phone: +49 3641 206-133
fax:   +49 2641 206-399