[R-pkg-devel] CRAN and CMake

[Gábor Csárdi]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Tim Keitt <tkeitt at utexas.edu> wrote:
[...]
>
> Is there  a way to allow the user to use a system installed cmake if they
> choose? The issue is R package dependencies -- a package author may put the
> R cmake package in depends and then everyone is forced to install the R
> package version even if they already have cmake.

It is not easy IMO. You can't declare that you need an R package or a
system package. AFAIK you can't even say that you need either this
package or that package.

cmake is clearly a build time dependency, like knitr for building
vignettes, but you can't explicitly declare build dependencies either.

The closest would be 'Suggests', and then at build time you get an
error message if there is no system cmake and no 'cmaker' package
either. Not quite perfect, though.

Gabor

[...]