[R-pkg-devel] pandoc version used in winbuilder

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 27/06/2019 9:51 a.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 26/06/2019 2:54 p.m., Lenth, Russell V wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> How does one tell what version of pandoc is being used by winbuilder (and probably other related CRAN-submission processes)?
> 
> The function rmarkdown::pandoc_version() will tell you.
>>
>> I have a package with several HTML vignettes, for which I use a custom style. I had decided to add the pandoc option '-strip-comments' to my script (my vignettes have quite a few HTML comments that are used for indexing and are not needed after the vignettes are built). When I built the package and submitted it for checking to winbuilder (for the development version of R), the result was that each vignette failed to rebuild, with a message that pandoc.exe has no option -strip-comments. However, that option has been available since pandoc version 2.0; and its latest version is 2.7.3.
>>
>> This is not a big deal for my package, so I just removed that option and then all was OK. But still, why are we having to rely on a relatively ancient version of pandoc?
> 
> It takes work to install a new version, and presumably nobody has done
> that work.  Pandoc is not easy to build, so some CRAN machines don't
> have it at all.
> 
> Your DESCRIPTION file should list it in SystemRequirements with the
> required version number.  I'd suggest using a reasonably low number if
> you want CRAN to accept and build your package.

By the way, I just looked through a fairly recent copy of CRAN, and only 
3 packages asked for pandoc >= 2.0.  So that's a reason it's been a low 
priority to install it.

Duncan Murdoch