[R-pkg-devel] Strange error from CRAN on package submission

[Kevin R. Coombes]

Hi,

I am trying to figure out how to fix warnings from two of the CRAN 
machines on the submission of an update to a package. The only change to 
my package was to add a "show" method to one of the S4 classes, which 
was requested by a reviewer of the paper we submitted. The inability to 
get this updated package into CRAN  is the only thing holding up the 
revision (and probable acceptance) of the manuscript.

The same "warnings"s were found in the previous version. The package is 
called Mercator, and the CRAN check results from the  last version are here:
   https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_Mercator.html

I get warnings from the two fedora machine instances (clang and gcc). 
They both report

> Check: whether package can be  installed.
> Result: WARN
>     Found the following significant  warnings:
>     Warning: namespace ‘flexmix’ is  not available and has been replaced
 >
 > Check: data for non-ASCII characters
> Result: WARN
>      Warning: namespace 'flexmix'  is not available and has been replaced
>      by .GlobalEnv when processing  object '<unknown>'

The relationships in the DESCRIPTION files are:

1. Mercator depends on Thresher
2. Thresher imports moVMF
3. moMVF suggests flexmix

On my Windows machine, the package builds and installs with no errors or 
warnings even if flexmix is not available (which I believe to be the 
correct behavior). On R-Forge, both the Windows and LINUX versions build 
and install with no errors or warnings. On R-Hub, tested on multiple 
LINUX versions, the package builds and installs with no errors or warnings.

And flexmix is still clearly available from CRAN:
   https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/flexmix/index.html

In the latest attempt to get things to work, I added
   Suggests: flexmix
into the DESCRIPTION file for Mercator, but this didn't help fix the 
problem on CRAN.

Is there anything I can do to fix this problem (other than moan here on 
this list and hope that CRAN can just install flexmix on those machines)?

Thanks in advance for your help,
   Kevin

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