[R-pkg-devel] Non-mainstream packages in vignette / dependency

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 22 May 2015 at 13:20, Peter Meissner via R-package-devel wrote:
| I would like to submit a package to CRAN but I also want to use two  
| non-mainstream packages in my vignette. Currently I have them stated in my  
| Suggests field but that leads to CRAN/Check complaints -understandably  
| since they cannot be obtained by install.packages().
| 
| I know, that there is the 'Additional_repositories' field for the  
| DESCRIPTION file but as the name (and the CRAN policies) say this is for  
| CRAN-like repositories and those two packages (AnomalyDetection,  
| BreakoutDetection) are on GitHub (e.g.  
| https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection).
| 
| Should I simply leave them out of the Suggests - that will lead to  
| complaints about non-stated dependencies in vignette.
| 
| Should I fake my vignette code so that the troubling part is actually not  
| run when building the vignette - that gives me headaches.
| 
| Is there some other, clean way ?

That is an excellent question that I have no answer to.

It so happens that I did put both of these packages (AnomalyDetection,
BreakoutDetection) into the 'ghrr' repository created by my drat package [1].

So I can install these packages fine as there is now a repo.  What I have not
done is tried to convince CRAN that such a non-CRAN, non-BioC, non-Omegahat
repo passes the implicit test set up by 'Additional_repositories'.

And to the best of my knowledge, nobody else has.  So that is really a CRAN
question.  [2]

Dirk


[1] I have posted / blogged a few times about drat. It basically sits on top
of install.packages() / update.packages() by providing repositories -- which
are super-easy to setup and host at GitHub via their built-in gh-pages
webserver.  See http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/drat.html as well as the
http://ghrr.github.io/drat pages for starting points, or ask me off-list.

[2] So the list is zero days old and already stalled. Wow.  ;-)

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