[R-pkg-devel] long file names in tar

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 18 April 2019 at 10:37, Steven Scott wrote:
| My Boom package makes a C++ library available to package authors (mainly
| me).  The wrapped library is used outside of R and must comply with
| external style rules such as UseLongDescriptiveNames, and files must be
| named for the class they contain.  From time to time a
| LongDescriptiveFileName, when paired with its full directory path, exceeds
| 100 characters.
| 
| This creates a conflict with CRAN's rules about long file names, which
| stems from tar.  I'm wondering what this community thinks about asking for
| that rule to be relaxed.  Both gnu tar and posix tar now allow unlimited
| length filenames, and the ustar format allows names up to 256 characters.
| 
| I'm interested in the opinions of people on this list about whether this
| rule has outlived its usefulness.  Thanks.

There are no "opinions". There is CRAN Repo Policy.

The BH package your Boom depends upon is actually named BH in part because
having a two-letter name shrunk the set of files violating this very
constraint.  Yet at every release I still get to renamed one file, and update
one include statement.  All documented in the ChangeLog.

So I would change the filenames, and move on.

Dirk

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