[Rd] Help finding source of warnings

[Prof J C Nash (U30A)]

I've been implementing a wrapper to the 2011 Fortran version of 
L-BFGS-B. In optim(), R uses a C translation of a Fortran version (the 
version number does not appear to be documented by the original 
authors). The authors of the original Fortran code have updated it and 
published the reasons in ACM TOMS due to inefficiencies and a bug.

In running the checks on the resulting package (which is on R-forge 
under the optimizer project), I'm getting a number of warning messages 
of the type

Warning in file.copy(file.path(.Library, pkg, "DESCRIPTION"), pd) :
   problem copying /usr/lib/R/library/mgcv/DESCRIPTION to 
/tmp/Rtmp0kkeHo/RLIBS_1214765d1c5f/mgcv/DESCRIPTION: No such file or 
directory

which reference DESCRIPTIONs for a number of packages other than the one 
being checked -- here mgcv -- and which are not referenced in my package 
as far as I can determine.

Possibly unrelated, when I run the code on a problem, it works for one 
run, then gives a NAMESPACE error and failure on the second try. Apart 
from this, checks and unit tests appear to work correctly.

Does anyone have pointers where I might find some ideas on the origin of 
the issue(s)? I suspect the warning messages are not particularly 
indicative of the source of the warnings, but that I have some subtle 
glitch in the setup and call to the Fortran.

I suspect this is not platform dependent, but I'm running Linux Mint 
17.1 (ubuntu derivative), and  R 3.1.2.

Cheers, JN