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

[Roger Bivand]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2018, Iñaki Ucar wrote:

> 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.

It is not "broken", it would be in the same situation as an R package 
user who had installed a package, but not its Suggested: dependencies. On 
running examples or tests from that R package, the code using the absent 
package would either be skipped, probably with a message or warning, or 
would lead to an error message suggesting which packages to install. None 
of this needs to be done at install time (install.packages(..., 
dependencies=TRUE) is not the default).

I've now located the source of includernw.sty, and can see possible 
improvements (if I can find out how to test the string length of `R RHOME` 
and equivalently trying to request("knitr") in a found R instance back to 
latex to throw an informative error.

>
> 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.

I will do this, and also try to get includernw de-listed from the schemes 
and collections affected (restoring the status quo, and also permitting 
includernw to hard-depend on whatever packagers found required.

Roger


>
> Iñaki
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand using nhh.no
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140
https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en