[R-pkg-devel] Has GitHub been used as a CRAN-style repository?

[Bruce Hoff]

Following up to my earlier post:  It looks like Dirk Eddelbuettel has in
fact built what I was asking for with 'drat',
https://github.com/eddelbuettel/drat.  The element that I do not see in
'drat' is a way to build Mac and Windows binaries, so I have two follow up
questons:
(1) Has anyone extended 'drat' in this way, to create a continuous build
system, e.g. using Github to host the source of their R package and drat to
publish the binaries, with a source/Windows/MacOS build system in between?;
(2) Has CRAN 'open sourced' how they build on Windows and MacOS to allow
someone to duplicate their build process?  I'm familiar with Rtools,
https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/installer.html, which is
certainly a key element, but is there a way to somehow clone the CRAN build
process, to have some assurance that one is building package binaries the
same way CRAN does?

Thanks,

Bruce Hoff
Sage Bionetworks


On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 6:37 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

>
> Bruce,
>
> As Ben and Thierry already mentioned (thanks!!) drat it pretty much
> designed
> to support that out of the box (but also supports repos elsewhere; however
> there are reasons such as gh-pages that make GitHub uniquely suited).  I
> have
> some moderately strongly-held beliefs about how install_github is IMHO
> unsuitable as a _release-mechanism_ which I think of as, say, tarballs
> taken
> at author-chosen points in time rather then semi-randomly selected commits
> you may end with.  And drat supports such releases.  We do have a few
> examples on CRAN for mixing CRAN with external releases, and some are in
> fact
> managed by drat.  We also rely on drat extensively at work for a local
> repo.
>
> When I first wrote drat about a year ago, not everybody "got it" -- so
> there
> are a bunch of vignettes, as well as my talk at useR! 2015 about.  Please
> peruse, and should you have questions do come back here (or file issues at
> it
> GitHub repo).
>
> Chaers, Dirk
>
> --
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
>

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