From Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at  Tue Sep 20 18:00:08 2005
From: Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:00:08 +0200
Subject: [Rd] Shy Suggestion?
In-Reply-To: <433016C6.3090100@jhsph.edu>
References: <1127222728.21824.15.camel@biol102145.oulu.fi>
	<433011BE.8090007@jhsph.edu>
	<1127224092.21824.20.camel@biol102145.oulu.fi>
	<433016C6.3090100@jhsph.edu>
Message-ID: <17200.12808.872332.67431@mithrandir.hornik.net>

>>>>> Roger D Peng writes:

> I think the reason is that the standard for 'R CMD check' is that
> examples in help pages are guaranteed to be executable by the user (as
> long as the requirements are met).  There is no way to guarantee this
> without having the packages installed.  So strictly speaking, the
> 'Suggested' packages are not needed by the *user*, but are needed by
> the *maintainer*.

> Perhaps, you differ with the standard itself, but I personally think
> it's a good one.

Those who really want to run R CMD check without forcing the suggestions
can do so via setting the "internal" environment variable
_R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_ to something "false", the test is via

  if(!identical(as.logical(Sys.getenv("_R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_")),
                FALSE))

If people feel very strongly about this, we could turn this into a check
profile variable to be set in ~/.R/check.conf.  Personally, both as a
developer and a CRAN maintainer I see little need in not forcing the
suggested packages at check time, as in both scenarios I prefer to act
as defensively as possible.

-k



[Rd] Shy Suggestion?
Kurt Hornik