[R-pkg-devel] fastICA on win-builder.r-project.org not installed?

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Guido Kraemer <gkraemer at bgc-jena.mpg.de>
>>>>>     on Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:26:14 +0200 writes:

    > Dear R package devels, I am trying to check a package
    > which depends on fastICA on win-builder.r-project.org, the
    > checks fail complaining that fastICA is not installed.

Well, you are *interpreting* the error message.
What is true is that fastICA is not *visible* in the
' R CMD check <yourPkg> '
environment.

    > PS: the log can be found here:
    > https://win-builder.r-project.org/265alZrIl0s6/00check.log

fastICA  is not at all mentioned in your DESCRIPTION file.
That is *always* wrong for any package you even only sometimes
use in your package.
... and that entirely explains why it is not found during checking.
Checking (almost) exactly only sees the packages that you
declare to "require".

Possibly adding the one line

Suggests: fastICA

to the DESCRIPTION file may be sufficient.
Please read more about this in *the* manual (for this topic):
"Writing R Extensions", part of every R installation and
browseable e.g., here
   https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html

https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html mentions different
formats, including Epub.

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich