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

[Balamuta, James Joseph]

Greetings and Salutations Marius,

For implementation help with “Additional_repositories”, which lacks a bit of documentation, please see: 
http://thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/r-data-packages-in-external-data-repositories-using-the-additional_repositories-field/

Under this approach, I am able use `imudata` package [https://github.com/smac-group/imudata] to build the vignettes within the `gmwm` package [https://github.com/smac-group/gmwm] with the suggests field filled in as: “Suggests: imudata”. Otherwise, CRAN would not accept the `gmwm` package as-is. 

(Regarding the package size claim, there really are not that many packages greater than 5 mb… For some figures on this, see: http://thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/size-and-limitations-of-packages-on-cran/ )

Sincerely,

JJB

On 5/21/16, 10:22 AM, "R-package-devel on behalf of Marius Hofert" <r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org on behalf of 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'.
>
>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
>
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