[R-pkg-devel] License of pre-built vignettes

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 24/10/2019 8:57 a.m., Helmut Schütz wrote:
> Dear all, since we have many examples in our vignettes (rendering takes
> about 7 minutes) we provide them in /inst/doc Another reason is to have
> HTML5 instead of XHTML1.0 produced by pandoc (which contains deprecated
> attributes). To prevent building we have BuildVignettes: no in the
> DESCRIPTION Building the source, and installation from the local zip
> works as intended (vignettes are listed by
> browseVignettes(package="ourpackage"), linked in the main man-page, and
> all internal links are fine. However, CHECK throws a WARNING FOSS
> licence with BuildVignettes: false If I understand that correctly, it
> means that license(s) could not retrieved. In the DESCRIPTION we have
> License: GPL (>=2) Furthermore, all vignettes have a license section We
> tried adding License_is_FOSS: yes and License_restricts_use: no to the
> DESCRIPTION without success. Any ideas? Helmut
> 

Writing R Extensions says that "BuildVignettes: false" should only be 
used in packages which do not have an open source license.

The CRAN Repository Policy says "If the package needs special treatment 
(for example if vignettes can only be run or re-built on the 
maintainer’s machine or take a very long time), say so on the submission 
form."

So it seems clear what to do:  remove the BuildVignettes: false 
statement, and explain why CRAN should avoid building them in your 
submission message.  This will likely make it take longer for the 
package to be handled; if that's a problem for you, you probably need to 
simplify the examples (or remove them).

Duncan Murdoch