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

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi,

As far as I know, that style file is part of the standard MacTeX distribution, which is built upon TeX Live, and includes the blkarray package by default. I have it installed on my MacBook and did not do anything other than a default install of the full MacTeX release:

 % find /usr/local -name blkarray.sty
/usr/local/texlive/2025/texmf-dist/tex/latex/blkarray/blkarray.sty

As Peter notes, I suspect that this is an issue on CRAN and would defer to Simon's interaction here.

Also, as an FYI to Peter, I note below from the file path that you have TeX Live 2024 installed. The distributions are updated annually, and 2025 was released this past spring (March/April time frame). I do not believe that a prior year distribution is maintained for updates once the current year distribution is released, even though you can have multiple annual releases installed in parallel.

Regards,

Marc

> On Dec 3, 2025, at 8:20 AM, Peter Dalgaard <pdalgd using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> Phone: (+45)38153501
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> 
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