[Rd] copy-before-ignore in R CMD build

[Tim Taylor]

Hi Ben

I think this was discussed recently on one of the lists (although that may be a figment of my imagination). Either way, for info, there is more related discussion over in https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17549.

Tim

> On 18 May 2026, at 19:36, Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  As currently implemented, R CMD build copies everything in the package directory to a working directory, then unlinks those in .Rbuildignore (see this comment by Jim Hester from 2018).
> 
> https://github.com/r-lib/rcmdcheck/issues/90#issuecomment-435938362
> 
>  If one accidentally happens :-( to create a directory with many gigabytes of junk in it, say from reverse-dependency-checking a widely used package, then the presence of that directory (even if .Rbuildignore'd) will make R CMD build hang as it tries to copy the contents of the directory ...
> 
>  I realize it's considerably more complicated to skip .Rbuildignore'd files in the process of copying (I don't see offhand how to do it without some fairly fancy unix-`find`-like tool, as opposed to a straight-up `file.copy(..., recursive = TRUE)`, but I wonder if there's any appetite for changing this behaviour?
> 
>  cheers
>   Ben Bolker
> 
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