[R-sig-Fedora] Fedora 29 upgrade: texlive-scheme-medium may depend on R (texlive-includernw)

[Iñaki Ucar]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2018 at 19:12, Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand using nhh.no> wrote:
>
> My point exactly. It should only run R RHOME to check for the existence of
> R (if this is what it does) at run time, not at install time. If it then,
> at run time, does not find R, or having found R does not find knitr
> (though Sweave is part of utils, so knitr is only needed by those using
> knitr to weave Rnw documents, or to convert from Rmd), it should issue
> helpful error messages to tell the user to install R, or to install knitr
> within R. By requiring to see R when being run by root/admin at install
> time, it is making invasive assumptions about the user environment.
>
> It could be that the texlive-includernw package itself does not require
> install time dependency fulfillment, and that this is something only the
> Fedora texlive packager has mis-understood.

Texlive packages don't require anything at build time, so Andreas has
nothing to do with this issue. The description of his package claims
that R and knitr are required at run time, so the Fedora packager (Tom
'spot' Callaway, in CC now) had to take a decision: either to avoid
non-texlive dependencies, which results in a broken installation
(texlive-includernw won't work without R), or to be more user-friendly
and install all the required run time dependencies.

Tom took the second path, as he did too with texlive-graphicxpsd, for
instance, which requires ImageMagick. Of course, this doesn't work for
you, but admittedly, having an R installation under your home
directory is not a typical case. I don't know whether there's any
official packaging guideline about this (i.e., non-texlive
dependencies vs. installing non-working texlive packages). If not, you
could ask Tom to reconsider his decision.

Iñaki