[R-pkg-devel] Adding .exes to R package?

[Ivan Krylov]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2020 20:54:40 +0000
Jonathan Greenberg <jgreenberg using unr.edu> wrote:

> Are there reasonable tutorials on how to do this?

If you absolutely have to do this, take a look at the tinytex package.
It is basically an installer for a preselected set of packages from TeX
Live inside a platform-specific directory. However, if you go this way,
I would like to ask you to preserve the use of manually-installed GDAL
as an option, because I consider manually installed (or distro-provided
in case of GNU/Linux) binaries much easier to trust than automatically
downloaded ones.

"Writing R extensions" mentions _building_ executables as part of the
package a few paragraphs down 1.1.5 Package subdirectories, but
describes such packages as "very special cases" and requiring a lot of
additional hassle: you'd have to provide src/Makefile{,.win} that
should manually build the shared object and the executables and
src/install.libs.R that would install both the shared object and the
executables. I don't think this approach is viable, since latest GDAL
sources are about 13M in size (compressed), and maintaining both the
package and the GDAL binaries would be a serious duplication of effort.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan