[R-pkg-devel] New Package Removal because Shared Library Too Large from Debugging Symbols

[Ben Bolker]

   Are you sure the issue that CRAN has is the library sizes, and not 
the issues flagged by the "LTO" platform 
<https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/LTO/README.txt> ?

https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/LTO/rar.out

   I would check with CRAN for clarification before you spend a lot of 
time trying to reduce package sizes. As you point out, lots of packages 
on CRAN have package sizes large enough to trigger this note -- it is my 
impression that CRAN only object if the large package size is considered 
unnecessary; some of the *inappropriate* reasons for large package size 
are listed in the repository policy 
<https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html>

===
Packages should be of the minimum necessary size. Reasonable compression 
should be used for data (not just .rda files) and PDF documentation: 
CRAN will if necessary pass the latter through qpdf.

As a general rule, neither data nor documentation should exceed 5MB 
(which covers several books). A CRAN package is not an appropriate way 
to distribute course notes, and authors will be asked to trim their 
documentation to a maximum of 5MB.

Where a large amount of data is required (even after compression), 
consideration should be given to a separate data-only package which can 
be updated only rarely (since older versions of packages are archived in 
perpetuity).

Similar considerations apply to other forms of “data”, e.g., .jar files.

Source package tarballs should if possible not exceed 10MB. It is much 
preferred that third-party source software should be included within the 
package (as e.g. a vendor.tar.xz file) than be downloaded at 
installation: if this requires a larger tarball a modestly increased 
limit can be requested at submission.
====

On 2024-01-20 2:38 p.m., Johann Gaebler wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I received the following message regarding  `rar` <https://cran.r-project.org/package=rar>, a package that I put up on CRAN two days ago:
> 
>> Dear maintainer,
>>
>> Please see the problems shown on
>> <https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_rar.html>.
>>
>> Please correct before 2024-02-02 to safely retain your package on CRAN.
> 
> The issue is that the compiled libraries are too large. The Mac CRAN checks turned up the following note:
> 
>> installed size is  8.9Mb
>> sub-directories of 1Mb or more:
>>   libs   8.7Mb
> 
> I have not been able to reproduce the issue either locally or on any machine I have ready access to. I have built it on some of the Rhub and R-Project build systems, and the same issue (with very different `libs` sizes) came up on some of them:
> 
> • (RHub) Ubuntu Linux 20.04.1 LTS, R-release, GCC: 18.2Mb,
> • (RHub) Fedora Linux, R-devel, clang, gfortran: 6.8Mb,
> • (R-Project) r-release-macosx-arm64: 8.5Mb.
> 
> Based on trying to read up about this, it seems that this is a pretty common problem <http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/14/#009_compact_shared_libraries> for compiled packages because of debugging symbols getting inserted into the shared library file. Using the fix from that blog post where you modify the Makevars to strip debugging symbols from the shared library seems to solve the issue on those build systems, so I feel reasonably confident that this is what’s going on.
> 
> Apparently many, many existing packages on CRAN have the same issue. However, I’m very new to R package development, so I’m not exactly sure what to do. I have two questions:
> 
> 1. Is there anything I need to “fix” here, or should I just make contact with the CRAN folks and bring the fact that this is being caused by debugging symbols to their attention?
> 2. Regardless of whether or not I have to fix this issue for CRAN, is there a way to strip out the debugging symbols that comports with CRAN policies? The method suggested in the blog post above (adding a phony target in `Makevars` that strips the shared library) seems not to be CRAN-compliant, but I could be mistaken about that. (In particular, I had to modify it locally to get it to run, so I’m not sure what the platform-independent version of it looks like.)
> 
> Thanks in advance for the help!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Johann D. Gaebler
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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-- 
Dr. Benjamin Bolker
Professor, Mathematics & Statistics and Biology, McMaster University
Director, School of Computational Science and Engineering
(Acting) Graduate chair, Mathematics & Statistics
 > E-mail is sent at my convenience; I don't expect replies outside of 
working hours.