[R-pkg-devel] rhub (version 2) baulking at building a vignette.

[Rolf Turner]

Thanks to Ivan Krylov and Dirk Eddelbuettel who came to my rescue.

At first I thought that Dirk's suggestion ("the zero-dependency
approach" due to Mark van der Loo) was exactly what I needed.  But this
turned out not to work; rhub_check() still failed with a complaint
about needing pdflatex.

Ivan's suggestion (the "asis" vignette from the R.rsp package) does
work.  This turns out to be easy enough to implement, but it has taken
me all day to get everything to run properly.  The difficulties were not
due to any characteristics of the "asis" approach, but rather to the
(to me) fussy, delicate, awkward, and counter-intuitive nature of rhub.
It kept finding new and innovative ways to frustrate me. ☹️ However I
finally won out.

I won't try to describe what I eventually did/had to do.  It is too
tortuous a tale of trial and error, with too many rhub "Gotchas!"
which I have difficulty reconstructing and to which I often cannot
remember the solutions.  I've got the solutions in place, and am just
crossing my fingers that I won't have to do it all over again.

Ivan Krylov <ikrylov using disroot.org> wrote:

<SNIP>

> Since your package doesn't seem to contain any native code, wouldn't
> the Windows users be satisfied with a source package? Unless running R
> CMD build --no-build-vignettes, it will include the PDF file.

Since I don't (ever) use Windoze myself, I have no feeling for what it
(and its users) will or will not tolerate.  Nor have I any way to test
out ideas.  So I prefer to go with building Windoze binaries, via rhub
or winbuilder.  (Using each as a back-up for the other.)  Now that I
know how (???) to do this, it's not too bad.

Thanks again to Ivan and Dirk.

cheers,

Rolf

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Department of Statistics
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