[R-pkg-devel] Rdmacros as Suggests rather than Imports

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 22/01/2021 4:51 p.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> On 22 January 2021 at 15:42, James Pustejovsky wrote:
> | Thanks very much for your input! By "patch it out" do you mean modify my
> | package description for the Debian distribution only? Would it work to
> 
> And code / content! Can't just alter the DESCRIPTION if the Rd still call mathjaxr.
> 
> | create a separate branch of my Github repo with modifications for the
> | Debian distro, and then submit that directly to Debian maintainers?
> |
> | I'm sorry for my naivete here--I'm just not quite sure how to proceed.
> 
> I attempted to lay out two alternatives:
> 
>   i)  where you remove mathjaxr, the Debian package just follows
>   ii) where you do nothing but the Debian package gets altered ("patched")
>       and then differs in that only it no longer uses mathjaxr
> 
> Hth,  Dirk
> 

I wonder if there's a way to define stubs for the macros in the package, 
and use mathjaxr versions only conditional on having it available?  I 
suspect that should be possible, but might require changes in R, not 
just in the individual packages.

As to the workaround in rgl:  since the mathjaxr macros are defined to 
be similar to the existing \eqn and \deqn macros in base R, it was easy 
to switch back to those and I (hopefully temporarily) dropped the 
mathjaxr dependency completely.  For a package that made more extensive 
use of math in the help pages it would be more work.

Duncan Murdoch