[R-pkg-devel] How do I prevent macOS from attempting to build my package?

[Uwe Ligges]

On 04.09.2018 16:36, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> Package status reports come in three different severities: NOTE, WARNING, and
> ERROR. Motivated by Brodie's nice (dependency-free) accessor function for
> per-maintainer status [1],  I have looked into reducing the number of ERRORs.
> 
> I hit a road block. Several of my packages depend on external libraries that
> must be present. I test for these in configure, but their absence is still an
> ERROR.  This makes the situation on macOS a little delicate. Simon, who is
> doing, and always done, a metric ton of work around R and OS X / maxOS is the
> only one who could change this but I cannot realistically ask him to keep a
> number of (in some cases more difficult or esoteric) libraries afloat. And
> some of these have now been missing on his platform for several years.
> 
> And in one case (RcppAPT, requiring libapt-dev) the build is even
> imppossible.  Now, the Fedora maintainer knows this and has the build
> blacklisted.
> 
> Hence:
> 
>    R> source("checkCRAN.R")
>                   Package ERROR WARN NOTE OK
>    [...]
>    23             RcppAPT     2            4
>    [...]
> 
> No failures from Fedora.  But two from macOS which I can never ever get rid
> off (unless I do silly code acrobatics by #ifdef'ing all real code away).
> 
> So here is my question:  Can we we please refine
> 
>    OS_type: unix
> 
> a little more, and/or maybe allow other blacklists in the package upload?
> 
> Thoughts or comments most welcome.

Comments:

Disclaimer for this field in general (as others are listening, too): we 
should always try not to use it alt all and produce cross platform code.


In your specific case: You can try to ask Simon or discuss this on 
R-devel so that most R-core members will read this, too.

Best,
Uwe





> 
> Thanks,  Dirk
> 
> 
> 
> [1] https://gist.github.com/brodieG/e60c94d4036f45018530ea504258bcf3#file-cran-check-r
>