[R-SIG-Mac] CRAN LaTeX infrastructure for packages

[Ben Bolker]

   I'm not a regular reader of r-sig-mac, but have a question about CRAN 
LaTeX infrastructure for MacOS.

   This may be a question specifically for Simon Urbanek, but thought 
I'd check here first in case anyone has insights.

   I recently sent a new version of the lme4 package (1.1-38) to CRAN; 
it passed all the incoming tests, but I'm now seeing warnings (at 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_lme4.html) from the 
r-release-macos-arm64  and r-oldrel-macos-arm64  (but *not* from the 
x86_64 platforms):

 >   ! LaTeX Error: File `blkarray.sty' not found.

This hasn't happened before.  Furthermore, when I go back in the git log 
for the package I see:

commit 3140cc0f1b394c6888d7704ee3d5de5f45df2886
Author: Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Aug 10 10:28:55 2017 -0400

     .Rbuildignore blkarray.sty as per CRAN request

In particular, Kurt Hornik sent a mass e-mail in 2017 to many package 
maintainers saying:

 >  These [packages] contain copies of standard LaTeX .sty files which 
should be excluded from the package (as shipping these copies should not 
be necessary, and may even cause trouble in case the local copies become 
outdated [as just happened for a recent CRAN submission]).

   So my best guess is that this is an oversight/platform glitch on the 
arm64 platforms ...

   Thoughts?

   sincerely
    Ben Bolker