[Rd] Best way to handle dependency on non-CRAN package / large data package?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 12 March 2015 at 08:41, arilamstein at gmail.com wrote:
| But I don't know if this is the best way to do this, or if there is
| anything else to consider. I have never had to manage package dependencies
| outside of CRAN, and have always thought of CRAN as being a "closed
| ecosystem", where there were not any dependencies outside of CRAN.
| 
| Can anyone provide guidance on this?

drat can help with this problem. Have a look at 

     http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/drat.html

as well as my blog and the GitHub repo of drat.

In a nutshell, it creates repositories you can access via update.packages()
and install.packages() as if they were CRAN or BioC.  It also uses GitHub to
automagically provide a repository server via the webserverd "embedded" in
each GitHub repo (and turned on as soon as you use the gh-pages branch).

Some package authors have turned to using drat to distribute packages (often
in addition to CRAN, you can also do it instead of CRAN given a constraint as
here).  One such package author and I are working on another short blog post
detailing just this.  If you want, I can send you an 'informal preview' as
yet another source of documentation.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org