[R-pkg-devel] Non-mainstream repository dependence for CRAN vignette building

[Bennett Nicolas]

Dear list

I’m in the process of submitting a package to CRAN that uses a non-mainstream repository for several data packages that are too large for CRAN (~50 MB in total) and therefore live in a drat repository hosted by gh. Data from these packages is used during vignette building and unsurprisingly, CRAN checks throw a “re-building of vignette” warning.

1. Is such a warning acceptable or is vignette re-build required to run through?
2. Is it allowed to create a set-up that essentially runs `install.packages()` during CRAN checks to make the non-mainstream repo packages available?
3. Are there any go-to solutions for such a scenario? I tried knitr caching, but was unsuccessful, to get that to work. What I’m currently doing is masking the package function that loads data and supplying the required data with the package. But this unnecessarily inflates package size (and adds complexity), as the data is already conveniently and separately available as an R package.

Best,
Nicolas