[R-pkg-devel] R CMD INSTALL succeeds while R CMD BUILD fails

[Sam Albers]

Hello all,

I am experiencing some issues with building a package that we are
hosting on GitHub. The package itself is quite large.  It is a data
package with a bunch of spatial files stored as .rds files.

The repo is located here: https://github.com/bcgov/bcmaps.rdata

If we clone that package to local machine via:
git clone https://github.com/bcgov/bcmaps.rdata

The first oddity is that the package installs successfully using this:

$ R CMD INSTALL "./bcmaps.rdata"

But fails when I try to build the package:

$ R CMD BUILD "./bcmaps.rdata"
* checking for file './bcmaps.rdata/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'bcmaps.rdata':
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files and shell scripts
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* looking to see if a 'data/datalist' file should be added
Warning in gzfile(file, "rb") :
  cannot open compressed file 'bcmaps.rdata', probable reason
'Permission denied'
Error in gzfile(file, "rb") : cannot open the connection
Execution halted


The second oddity is that if I remove the . from the Package name in
the DESCRIPTION file, the build proceeds smoothly:

$ R CMD build "./bcmaps.rdata"
* checking for file './bcmaps.rdata/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'bcmapsrdata':
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files and shell scripts
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* looking to see if a 'data/datalist' file should be added
* building 'bcmapsrdata_0.2.0.tar.gz'

I am assuming that R CMD install builds the package internally so I
find it confusing that I am not able to build it myself. Similarly
confusing is the lack of a . in the package name indicative of
anything?

Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks in advance,

Sam