On 11.04.2011 02:47, Hervé Pagès wrote:
Hi,

More about the new --resave-data option

As mentioned previously here

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-April/060511.html

'R CMD build' and 'R CMD INSTALL' handle this new option
inconsistently. The former does --resave-data="gzip" by default.
The latter doesn't seem to support the --resave-data= syntax:
the --resave-data flag must either be present or not. And by
default 'R CMD INSTALL' won't resave the data.

Also, because now 'R CMD build' is resaving the data, shouldn't it
reinstall the package in order to be able to do this correctly?

Here is why. There is this new warning in 'R CMD check' that complains
about files not of a type allowed in a 'data' directory:


http://bioconductor.org/checkResults/2.8/bioc-LATEST/Icens/lamb1-checksrc.html


The Icens package also has .R files under data/ with things like:

bet <- matrix(scan("CMVdata", quiet=TRUE),nc=5,byr=TRUE)

i.e. the R code needs to access some of the text files located
in the data/ folder. So in order to get rid of this warning I
tried to move those text files to inst/extdata/ and I modified
the code in the .R file so it does:

CMVdata_filepath <- system.file("extdata", "CMVdata", package="Icens")
bet <- matrix(scan(CMVdata_filepath, quiet=TRUE),nc=5,byr=TRUE)

But now 'R CMD build' fails to resave the data because the package
was not installed first and the CMVdata file could not be found.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people that means that the safe way to
build a source tarball now is with

R CMD build --keep-empty-dirs --no-resave-data


Hervé,

actually is makes some sense to have these defaults from a CRAN maintainer's point of view:

--keep-empty-dirs:
we found many packages containing empty dirs unnecessarily and the idea is to exclude them at the build state rather than at the later installation stage. Note that the package maintainer is supposed to run build (and knows if the empty dirs are to be included, the user who runs INSTALL does not).

--no-resave-data:
We found many packages with unsufficiently compressed data. This should be fixed when building the package, not later when installing it, since the reduces size is useful in the source tarball already.

So it does make some sense to have different defaults in build as opposed to INSTALL from my point of view (although I could live with different, tough).

If you need further arguments for the discussion: I also tend to use --no-vignettes nowadays if my code does not change considerably. ;-)

Best wishes,
Uwe



I hope the list of options/flags that we need to use to "fix" 'R CMD
build' (and make it consistent with R CMD INSTALL) is not going to
grow too much ;-)

Thanks,
H.



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