[R-pkg-devel] [UNCLASSIFIED] Remotes in description when submitting a package until a dependency is fixed

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 15/11/2022 11:59 p.m., Hugh Parsonage wrote:
> I think you've misunderstood that excerpt.  By "temporary development
> state", it means _between_ CRAN releases; packages in a development
> state are not suitable for CRAN, as the policy states:
> 
>> CRAN hosts packages of publication quality and is not a development platform.
> 
> You'll need to stop depending on that package until it's fixed and the
> fix is on CRAN. That said, it looks like it might be relatively
> straightforward to disentangle yourself from the package -- just
> rewrite the offending example?

Another solution is to put a version of that package in your own drat 
repository, and use "Additional_repositories".  For example, at one 
point rgl used webshot2 before it was released, and I had

   Suggests:  webshot2, ...
   Additional_repositories:  https://dmurdoch.github.io/drat

with a copy of webshot2 in the drat repository.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you'll need to keep that 
repository up to date as the third party package evolves, and eventually 
remove the Additional_repositories: line from your DESCRIPTION, which 
requires your own package update.

See https://github.com/eddelbuettel/drat for instructions on setting up 
the drat repository.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 at 15:35, Bernd.Gruber <Bernd.Gruber using canberra.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a package (dartR) that needs to be updated by CRAN (and got a time set until a certain date). It depends on a package that is currently showing errors in the CRAN results and therefore fails. The maintainer of that package is busily trying to rectify the error (as can be seen be repeated submissions in the last weeks), but was not able yet to fix it. As we are running out of time my approach would be to have a version of the package that fixes it and use Remotes: in the description. It runs fine without errors.
>>
>> In the R-packages book I read the following:
>>
>> "It's important to note that you should not submit your package to CRAN in the intermediate state, meaning with a Remotes field and with a dependency required at a version that's not available from CRAN or Bioconductor. For CRAN packages, this can only be a temporary development state, eventually resolved when the dependency updates on CRAN and you can bump your minimum version accordingly."
>>
>> So is it okay to submit our package with a remote statement until the maintainer of the other package has fixed their issues?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Bernd
>>
>>
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