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

[Marius Hofert]

On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Henrik Bengtsson
<henrik.bengtsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 8:22 AM, Marius Hofert
> <marius.hofert at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>> 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'.
>
> First, there are plenty of CRAN package using:
>
> Additional_repositories: http://r-forge.r-project.org/
>
> is used, cf. https://github.com/search?q=org%3Acran+Additional_repositories%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fr-forge.r-project.org&type=Code
>
> so this should be ok. I'm using it too.
>
>>
>> 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'.
>
> It sounds that one of your vignettes, examples or package tests
> requires the qrmdata package.  It is ok to use:
>
> Suggests: qrmdata
>
> but then you should make sure it is truly optional throughout, i.e. use
>
> if (require("qrmdata")) {
>   ## Use qrmdata functions here
> }

Hi Henrik,

Thanks a lot. That's indeed a good idea.

Cheers,
Marius


>
> in your tests, examples etc.
>
> This is common practice. See also Writing R Extensions.
>
> Maybe there's something else to it?  It would help clarify your
> problem if we could see the R CMD check issues and the code (online
> repository?).
>
> My $.02
>
> Henrik
>
>>
>> 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
>>
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