CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgithubcran
user3298179
user3298179

Reputation: 193

Make CRAN R package suggest GitHub R package

I want to use the R package BOLTSSIRR available on GitHub in my R package, which I want to upload to CRAN.

I listed BOLTSSIRR under Suggests: in the DESCRIPTION file and made the link to GitHub available using Additional_repositories: https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR.

However, running R CMD check --as-cran I get:

Suggests or Enhances not in mainstream repositories:
  BOLTSSIRR
Availability using Additional_repositories specification:
  BOLTSSIRR   no   ?                                          
  ?            ?   https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR
Additional repositories with no packages:
  https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR

So the GitHub link does not seem to get recognized in the check. Might I have to change something here?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 915

Answers (2)

clabornd
clabornd

Reputation: 51

Answering since I cant comment. @user2554330 answer is correct, and will fix the additional package not being available. However, you may still get a NOTE about:

Package suggested but not available for checking: <yourpackage>

which you should be able to explain is a result of the drat-hosted library, but the package will not be available for e.g. vignettes/examples in checks. This note in CRAN policies still applies:

A package listed in ‘Suggests’ or ‘Enhances’ should be used conditionally in examples or tests if it cannot straightforwardly be installed on the major R platforms. (‘Writing R Extensions’ recommends that they are always used conditionally.)

In my submission I was getting errors in examples due to not being able to find a package hosted in a drat repo that was listed in Additional_repositories. One way around this is to use @examplesIf requireNamespace("yourpackage", quietly = TRUE) instead of @examples in roxygen comments or conditionally run stuff in vignettes with

if (requireNamespace("yourpackage", quietly = TRUE)) {
  result = yourpackage::function()
  # ...
}

Upvotes: 1

user2554330
user2554330

Reputation: 44867

As you found, you can't use Remotes in a CRAN package. What you need to do is to make sure the .tar.gz file for the package you are depending on is available somewhere. Github doesn't do that automatically, because https://github.com/daviddaigithub/BOLTSSIRR isn't set up as a package repository.

The solution is to create your own small repository, and keep copies of non-CRAN packages there. The drat package (available here: https://github.com/eddelbuettel/drat) makes this easy as long as you have a Github account: follow the instructions here: https://github.com/drat-base/drat. In summary:

  1. Fork https://github.com/drat-base/drat into your account, and clone it to your own computer.
  2. Enable Github Pages with the docs/ folder in the main branch.
  3. Install the drat package into R using remotes::install_github("eddelbuettel/drat"). (I assume this version will make it to CRAN eventually; if you use the current CRAN version instructions are slightly more complicated.)
  4. Build the package you want to insert. You need the source version; you might want binaries too, if those are hard for your users to build.
  5. Run options(dratBranch="docs"); drat::insertPackage(...) to insert those files into your repository.
  6. Commit the changes, and push them to Github.
  7. In the package that needs to use this non-CRAN package, add
    Additional_repositories: https://yourname.github.io/drat
    to the DESCRIPTION.

You will be responsible for updating your repository if BOLTSSIRR is updated. This is good because the updates might break yours: after all, it's still in development mode. It's also bad because your users won't automatically get bug fixes.

That's it, if I haven't missed anything!

Upvotes: 7

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