[Rd] Testing R build when using --without-recommended-packages?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 4 May 2021 at 09:31, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
| I'm on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). How do I check an R build when using
| --without-recommended-packages? 'make check' assumes 'recommended'
| packages are installed, so that fails without them available.

[...]

| BTW, isn't this a bug? Shouldn't this example run conditionally on
| 'MASS' being installed, because 'MASS' is a suggested package here;

The 'R-admin' manual in Section 1.2 "Getting patched and development
versions" ends on 

  If downloading manually from CRAN, do ensure that you have the correct
  versions of the recommended packages: if the number in the file VERSION
  is ‘x.y.z’ you need to download the contents of
  ‘https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir’, where dir is
  ‘x.y.z/Recommended’ for r-devel or x.y-patched/Recommended for r-patched,
  respectively, to directory src/library/Recommended in the sources you
  have unpacked. After downloading manually you need to execute
  tools/link-recommended from the top level of the sources to make the
  requisite links in src/library/Recommended. A suitable incantation from
  the top level of the R sources using wget might be (for the correct
  value of dir)

      wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A\*.gz -nd -P src/library/Recommended \
        https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir
      ./tools/link-recommended

Dirk

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