[R-pkg-devel] Errors from Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream repositories

[Ben Bolker]

I got something similar.  I have a few thoughts:

(1) you should use  "if (require(citrus)) { ... }" in your examples;
"Suggests" and "Enhances" packages are supposed to be *optional*, i.e.
examples and tests should be able to run even if they're not installed
(I would imagine that "Writing R Extensions" and/or the CRAN policies
say something to this effect, but I haven't checked)
(2) I can imagine that win-builder is looking for *binary* versions of
the package (I'm not sure why this would be the default, and why it
couldn't fall back and install from source, but that would be my
guess); do you have binary versions, for the appropriate major R
version (i.e. 3.5 for release, maybe?? 3.4 for oldrelease??), in your
repo. (In my example, I don't; I was going to try compiling a binary
version and putting it in the repo. This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg
problem if you can't get a binary built because the examples fail, but
if you implement step #1 I think it should work).

My point (3) is a follow-on question that I would love an answer to,
or hints. I get a *message* similar to the one found in throm's
win-builder logs, i.e. "Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream
repositories: ..." - but since it's not labeled as a WARNING or an
ERROR (or even a NOTE), I am wondering what its status is in the
CRAN-maintainers' eyes - is it a CRAN-submission-blocking problem? Or
a "we'd rather you didn't do that but we'll accept it this time?" or
...

   I'm not asking anyone (except possibly CRAN maintainers) to speak
for the CRAN maintainers, but if anyone has any experience or guesses
(or pointers to parts of the CRAN policies/Writing R Extensions
document that I overlooked) I'd appreciate hearing about it.

  cheers
     Ben Bolker
On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 5:28 PM Throm, Allison <throm using wustl.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
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> I'm trying to submit a package to the CRAN that further examines results from the "citrus" package as done for an accepted publication (available on Github: <https://github.com/nolanlab/citrus>).
>
>
> I do not get any errors when using devtools::check() on my Mac, which already has the citrus package installed. However, I am getting errors during the CRAN submission check <https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/mineCitrus_1.0.0_20180702_172340/>.
>
>
> I've tried searching Stack Overload and other CRAN packages with Additional_repositories fields, but none of the applicable solutions have worked. I'm pretty sure it's the loading of the citrus package that is causing the error and have added the Additional_repositories field with a link the package on Github, but still haven't been able to resolve the issue. There are very specific installation instructions for the package <https://github.com/nolanlab/citrus/wiki/Installing-Citrus>, which may be contributing to issues.
>
>
> How should I properly specify dependencies on the nolanlab/citrus<https://github.com/nolanlab/citrus> Github package for my CRAN package?
>
>
> Thank you in advance,
>
> Allison
>
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