[R-pkg-devel] Overcoming CRAN's 5mb vendoring requirement

[Neal Richardson]

CRAN policy [1] says: "If the sources are too large, it is acceptable
to download them as part of installation, but do ensure that the
download is of a fixed version rather than the latest." So you could
try downloading the source in your configure script. Though be careful
not to be bitten by this other line from the policy: "Packages which
use Internet resources should fail gracefully with an informative
message if the resource is not available or has changed (and not give
a check warning nor error)."

Neal

[1]: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html


On Wed, May 8, 2024 at 11:03 AM Josiah Parry <josiah.parry using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am sorry for blowing up this thread lately.
>
> I've submitted a package to CRAN that uses Rust which thus requires
> dependencies to be vendored. https://github.com/R-ArcGIS/arcgisutils/
>
> The vendored dependencies are 18mb when zipped and 16.4mb when zipped with
> XZ -9e. The *installed package size is 1.2mb* on my Mac.
>
> CRAN has rejected this package with:
>
> *   Size of tarball: 18099770 bytes*
>
> *Please reudce to less than 5 MB for a CRAN package.*
>
>
> Due to the requirement to vendor my dependencies. I do not see any possible
> way to compress 250mb of source code to <= 5mb.
>
> I suspect there are alternatives which have been handled in one-off
> situations given that other packages require fairly large system
> dependencies e.g. Arrow, DuckDB, torch etc.
>
> How do others handle this?
>
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>
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