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

[Ben Bolker]

    OK, then this is my official request to include blkarray.sty in the 
set of available LaTeX style files on the arm64 platform ... (i.e. the 
blkarray LaTeX package, 
https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/blkarray?lang=en )

  This is the list of 'unnecessary' style files that were included in 
Kurt Hornik's 2017 e-mail to maintainers.  I don't know if there's an 
easy way to diff against the set of files that TinyTeX provides ...


a4wide.sty
actuarialangle.sty
actuarialsymbol.sty
algorithm2e.sty
algorithmic.sty
amsmath.sty
amssymb.sty
authblk.sty
blkarray.sty
bm.sty
chicago.sty
enumitem.sty
environ.sty
fancyhdr.sty
fancyheadings.sty
fancyvrb.sty
float.sty
framed.sty
fullpage.sty
geometry.sty
inconsolata.sty
layout.sty
longtable.sty
natbib.sty
nicefrac.sty
placeins.sty
relsize.sty
shadethm.sty
siunitx.sty
srcltx.sty
subfigure.sty
svnkw.sty
svn-multi.sty
tabu.sty
titleps.sty
titlesec.sty
titletoc.sty
trimspaces.sty
upquote.sty
versions.sty
zi4.sty

   I don't know if you should try to provide all these, or wait for 
tests to fail and fix things one package at a time ...

   cheers
    Ben Bolker

On 12/3/25 14:33, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> Ben,
> 
> it is not an oversight in that I'm not aware of any agreed set of optional packages. I'm also not aware of the discussion you quote from 2017, but if there is anything that you need that is not in the standard set then all you need to do is tell me that you require it.
> 
> The change is that the most recent builds are now done on VMs that are now setup fully automatically (=no manual intervention) and use TinyTeX instead of MacTeX to make maintenance easier - FWIW  see
> https://github.com/R-macos/vm-scripts-mini-r/blob/master/shared/setup.sh
> 
> If you need any packages that are not a part of the standard TinyTeX bundle then you just need to tell me (or you can ask TinyTeX to include it so it is available to others as well).
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon
> 
> 
>> On 3/12/2025, at 1:10 PM, 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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> 

-- 
Dr. Benjamin Bolker
Professor, Mathematics & Statistics and Biology, McMaster University
Associate chair (graduate), Mathematics & Statistics
Director, School of Computational Science and Engineering
* E-mail is sent at my convenience; I don't expect replies outside of 
working hours.