[R-pkg-devel] System requirements of a vignette engine

[iv@ircu m@iii@g oii m@iibox@org]

Dear All,
inspired by Karl Broman`s reader on using 'knitr' with 'asciidoc'
(http://kbroman.org/knitr_knutshell/pages/asciidoc.html), I wrote package
rasciidoc some time ago.
It is just a wrapper to knitr and asciidoc, which is a system requirement for
the package. CRAN does not need to have asciidoc installed to build and check
the package, although the package is pretty useless without asciidoc.

Now I have added a vignette engine to write vignettes using rasciidoc.
And here is the problem: this engine obviously needs asciidoc to be installed, 
which is not the case on CRAN, so the package with the vignette engine fails the
autocheck.
Writing vignettes that cannot go to CRAN seems pretty pointless. Does that mean
that writing vignette engines that do not rely on pandoc or LaTeX is pointless?
Or is it possible to get system requirements for vignette engines installed on
CRAN?

Thanks for your answers,
Dominik