[R-pkg-devel] Large data package

[Ayala Hernandez, Rafael]

Dear All,

Following Dirk's suggestion below, I have recently added a data package as a drat repository for my asteRisk package, placing it under Suggests in the main package.
In order to keep the code tidy and know exactly when I’m accessing the data in the data package, I access all the data in the data package as asteRiskData:::Item

This seems to be working fine, but upon CHECK I am getting the following NOTE: 

  Unavailable namespace imported from by a ':::' call: ‘asteRiskData’
    See the note in ?`:::` about the use of this operator.

The mentioned Note says:

It is typically a design mistake to use ::: in your code since the corresponding object has probably been kept internal for a good reason. Consider contacting the packagemaintainer if you feel the need to access the object for anything but mere inspection.

Here I have decided by design to keep the objects internal in the data package, since they are only meant to be accessed by functions of the main package. 
I am wondering if anyone has had any experience with this NOTE before? Is it acceptable to leave it for submission of the updated version to CRAN?

Thanks a lot in advance

Best wishes,

Rafa

> El 28 abr 2021, a las 0:04, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> escribió:
> 
> 
> *******************
> This email originates from outside Imperial. Do not click on links and attachments unless you recognise the sender. 
> If you trust the sender, add them to your safe senders list https://spam.ic.ac.uk/SpamConsole/Senders.aspx to disable email stamping for this address.
> *******************
> 
> On 27 April 2021 at 10:26, Ayala Hernandez, Rafael wrote:
> | I am in the process of including a large update for my package asteRisk, that will require the usage of large data files (amounting in total to ~100 MB).
> | 
> | Given the CRAN package size limits of 5 MB, I am wondering what is the preferred solution in these cases? I have read multiple possibilities, such as requesting to CRAN to host a data-only package that would be updated very infrequently, or hosting the data in another repository and providing functions in the main package to retrieve the required files.
> 
> In case you have not seen it yet, the R Journal article Brooke and I wrote a
> few years ago covers exactly this use case, and walks through how to cover it
> in a fairly detailed way.
> 
> https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2017/RJ-2017-026/index.html
> 
> @article{RJ-2017-026,
>  author = {G. Brooke Anderson and Dirk Eddelbuettel},
>  title = {{Hosting Data Packages via drat: A Case Study with Hurricane
>          Exposure Data}},
>  year = {2017},
>  journal = {{The R Journal}},
>  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2017-026},
>  url = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2017-026},
>  pages = {486--497},
>  volume = {9},
>  number = {1}
> }
> 
> Hope this helps, Dirk
> 
> -- 
> https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org