[R-pkg-devel] What's recommended to do on "Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream repositories: ..."?

[Marius Hofert]

Hi,

I have (co-)developed two packages: 'qrmtools' and 'qrmdata'. The
latter contains data sets and is currently only available on R-Forge
(as it is larger than 5MB and thus not accepted for CRAN [although
there are much larger packages, but that's a different story...]).
'qrmtools' contains mainly tools that show what can be done with data
such as the one contained in 'qrmdata' -- and thus has 'qrmdata' in
Suggests. The check shows 'Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream
repositories: qrmdata'; I also added 'Additional_repositories:
http://r-forge.r-project.org/' to DESCRIPTION.... but of course
winbuilder reports errors as it can't find 'qrmdata'.

I'm wondering about what I am supposed to do: Remove everything about
'qrmdata' from 'qrmtools'? Clearly, the easiest solution, but that's a
bit dull as the 'qrmtools' can be nicely used to deal with the data
from 'qrmdata'.

How 'severe' is this issue for vignettes? I guess since they are
checked as well, one would run into the same problem. But then a
vignette even more so should show/replicate the functionality of a
paper, say, and there one would definitely like to work with the
data...

The only partially related thread I found was
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2015q2/000002.html

In any case, I continue to pray to the R gods in the hope that the 5MB
limit will change for data-related packages (which are updated very
rarely) at some point in the future... Some 'adaptive limits' would be
nice: The less often you submit, the larger the data package can be
(for example), up to a certain larger limit more suitable for
data-related packages.

Any ideas on (all of) that?

Cheers,
Marius