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

[Peter Dalgaard]

Hi Ben,

For whatever is is worth, I do have (on an M4)

% find /usr/local -name blkarray.sty
/usr/local/texlive/2024/texmf-dist/tex/latex/blkarray/blkarray.sty

and I don't recall doing anything special to get it. So yes, most likely there's a glitch in the TeX install on the macos-arm64 builder.

-pd


> On 3 Dec 2025, at 01.10, Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  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package (as shipping these copies should not be necessary, and may even cause trouble in case the local copies become outdated [as just happened for a recent CRAN submission]).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
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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