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

[Henrik Bengtsson]

There's also a more-recent, related discussion titled 'Bug 18186:
ignore broken symlinks in R CMD build #49' at
<https://github.com/r-devel/r-dev-day/issues/49>, with useful
comments.

/Henrik

On Mon, May 18, 2026 at 12:06 PM Tim Taylor
<tim.taylor using hiddenelephants.co.uk> wrote:
>
> For completeness here’s the thread I recalled
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2024-August/083610.html
>
> Tim
>
> > On 18 May 2026, at 19:46, Tim Taylor <tim.taylor using hiddenelephants.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > 
> > 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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