[R-pkg-devel] Submitting to CRAN a package depending on RGtk2

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 19 October 2016 at 23:24, Lorenzo Busetto wrote:
| thanks for the answer. Yes, I know that that does the trick. In fact,
| in our  github README we have
| the following intructions:
| 
| "Install the following required dependencies:
| 
| Cairo >= 1.0.0, ATK >= 1.10.0, Pango >= 1.10.0, GTK+ >= 2.8.0, GLib >=
| 2.8.0 (required by package RGtk2)
| Curl (required by package curl)
| GDAL >= 1.6.3, PROJ.4 >= 4.4.9 (required by package rgdal)
| 
| On Debian and Ubuntu-based systems, to install those packages open a
| terminal and type
| 
| sudo apt-get install r-cran-cairodevice r-cran-rgtk2
| libcurl4-openssl-dev libgdal-dev libproj-dev  "

That's pretty good for the README. And yes, you need those -dev package for gdal.
 
| One of my questions here (maybe dumb), is how/where I should  specify
| those dependencies when submitting to CRAN.
| Is putting intructions like these in the readme of the package
| sufficient, or do I need to do something else ? That's what I was
| asking as first point of the "Linux" part of the previous post (sorry
| if it was not clear).

The 'SystemRequirements:' field in DESCRIPTION is the usual spot.

You can then test in a script 'configure' (which can be a shell script) to
see if the packages are installed / useable / survive a test compilation.
Jeroen has a scheme for that in a few of his recent package; but his dislike
of autoconf makes that a little over the top.  Maybe you can just rely on
pkg-config to do most of the work for you? Ie a la

  edd at max:~$ pkg-config --exists gdal && echo "Yes"
  Yes
  edd at max:~$ pkg-config --modversion gdal
  1.11.3
  edd at max:~$


Dirk

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