[R-pkg-devel] Getting a package ready for CRAN - some questions

[Hadley Wickham]

On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 7:10 PM, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal
<roy.mendelssohn at noaa.gov> wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I am in the midst of some minor revisions to my xtractomatic package, which up till now has only been on github.  Since ncdf4 for Windows is now available from CRAN  (and many thanks to whomever is responsible for that) I thought I would try to get it into CRAN.  Some questions:
>
> 1.  The vignette uses a lot of packages that the main code does not - I put those in the DESCRIPTION file, under  “Suggests”, is this correct?

Yes.

> 2. The vignette uses ggfortify, which was in CRAN for 3.2.x, but is not in CRAN for 3.3.x.  Do I assume then that a submission will fail, or will the submission work but just without the vignette?  Or can I include in the vignette the command to install from github  (using devtools), and then that will build?

You definitely do not want to install packages when running a vignette.

Given that ggfortify has been archived
(https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggfortify/index.html), I'd
recommend using a different package (maybe broom?).

> 3. On a remote build, my vignette is likely to fail to build.  That is because the vignette downloads a large amount of data in many requests, and if for any reason any one of the downloads fail or times out, the vignette build will fail.  As above, will this cause the entire submission to fail, or just the vignette to fail?  And is there anyway to provide a pre-built vignette in the submission?

You shouldn't be downloading data in a vignette. Can you make a
separate data package that just bundles the data?

Hadley

-- 
http://hadley.nz