[R-pkg-devel] missing wget, cmake, pkg-config,..etc

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 7 October 2019 at 11:42, Sameh M. Abdulah wrote:
| I am using some tools through my package installation such as wget, cmake, pkg-config.  The users complain that the installation failed because of missing such tools on their system. They need to install them separately before installation my package. Is this normal, or I need to include something on my package to prevent this from happening.

R is an application, not an operating system.

It has no control over this. As such you are asking in the wrong place --
especially as R *is* cross-platform and not all such tools and helpers are
(well, were) easily available everywhere.

So yes, if your package requires it, and the user does not have it, you have
to guide the user through this via testing and maybe a helpful message.  Many
of use have written configure.ac code to test for these things. The easiest
solution is, of course, to not have exotic depends in the first place.

And no, it is generally not the role of your R package to supply wget, cmake,
pkg-config, ... to the system. You can note in the SystemRequirements: field
of your DESCRIPTION file (and also the free-form Description:) if something
unusual is required.

And sometimes you just can't. I too have two projects / packages not on CRAN
as I (still) cannot assume its required libraries to be present on all
OSs. Getting libraries installed is hard, and we have to be careful to not
stress the CRAN maintainers too much over this.  Shipping _your_ package or
application as a Docker container can be an alternative too.

Dirk

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