[R-pkg-devel] different build tools

[Simon Urbanek]

Ross,

R CMD build is the only offical way to build a (source) package in R.

All other "tools" are just convenience wrappers by 3rd parties that call R CMD build eventually. There is no reason to assume that those tools should behave in a certain way - nor are you required to use them. They typically do other pre-processing which their authors deemed useful (typically based on yet another packages). Finally, RStudio is a 3rd party GUI by the company Posit Software, PBC which changes/augments the behaviour of R and provides additional tools - it is not R nor directly related to R (nor CRAN). The packages you mentioned are also maintained by Posit.

Please note that CRAN has nothing to do with any of the above - a package submitted to CRAN is the resulting package source tar ball which the author created by calling R CMD build - CRAN is not involved in the source package creation, it only requires it to be created with R CMD build for submission. Whether you desire some pre-processing, before you call R CMD build yourself, it's up to you.

Cheers,
Simon


> On 29/05/2024, at 10:20 AM, Boylan, Ross via R-package-devel <r-package-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> There are at  least 4 ways to build a package:
> 
>  1.  R CMD build
>  2.  pkgbuild::build(), which I  believe calls 1.
>  3.  devtools::build(), which calls 2.
>  4.  RStudio GUI, which calls 3.
> 
> I recently discovered these don't all behave the same.  Invoking bootstrap.R at  the start
> requires 2 or greater.  And invoking 3 directly produced different behavior than 4,
> apparently because of  different defaults for the clean_doc option of 2.
> 
> Similar remarks apply to R CMD check.
> 
> I'm puzzled by the plethora of tools and options.  In particular I had assumed that if check
> and build worked in RStudio, I'd get the same results from R CMD.  I assume the latter is
> used on CRAN, and so it would be reasonable to expect the package would build there.
> 
> Can anyone help me understand what's going on?  More specifically, what are the design
> goals of the different tools.  Clearly if devtools::build were the same as pkgbuild:build there
> would be no reason for the former to exist.
> 
> Thanks.
> Ross
> 
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