[Rd] R CMD check and CRAN's Rust policy

[Simon Urbanek]

Mossa,

the issue you cite is lacking any pertinent information and it's not even clear why it should be an issue. The check is perfectly justified, it just reports whether a package using rust declares this correctly and where it downloads 3rd party content - something that is important to R users in general and not related to CRAN. I don't see how any of this is "prohibitive" it just calls out what the package is already doing.

As discussed before, my hope was that the "R"ust community will mature enough to work on proper support. It is not clear that it happened yet, but once it does it would make sense to talk about support just as we have for C, C++ and Java, so certainly that should be the right discussion. However, it will have to start with some thinking and a proposal on how the associated issues (compiler support, versioning, dependency sources etc.) are to be addressed, as opposed to making random demands. All this has nothing to do with CRAN so the issue you mention seems irrelevant to the progress. Also I'd like to know what are the "challenges embedded in R itself".

Cheers,
Simon


> On Mar 2, 2025, at 8:45 AM, Mossa Merhi Reimert via R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone!
> 
> I'm Mossa, I'm one of the maintainers of extendr, an automated generation of bindings project for
> Rust code, for use in R-packages.
> 
> I'm writing to you, as R 4.4.3 was just released, and there have not been
> follow-up on an issue important to us. Link to the issue as discussed on r-devel
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2024-October/083666.html
> 
> A community member has provided a suggestion to a patch here https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/pull/182, and we have also attempted to bring it up on
> Bugzilla: https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18806
> 
> TLDR: Default `R CMD check` uses additional CRAN-specific checks for Rust,
> instead of keeping this behind the --as-cran flag.
> 
> I would like to say, that there is a growing interest in Rust within the R community.
> And generally, Rust becoming a widely adopted language within the Python community (including the scientific part of that community). It is time to deal with the
> pain points with using Rust in R.
> 
> Therefore, I would kindly ask that we have a dialogue on how to remedy the issue above first, and how we may deal with other issues going forward. There are both challenges embedded in R itself, and the current CRAN policy for Rust is prohibitive.
> 
> 
> 
> Mossa Merhi Reimert
> Postdoctoral Researcher
> 
> K�benhavns Universitet
> Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences
> Animal Welfare and Disease Control
> Gr�nneg�rdsvej 8
> 1870 Frederiksberg C
> Denmark
> 
> +45 35324135
> mossa using sund.ku.dk<mailto:mossa using sund.ku.dk>
> 
> 
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