I have just written a package called choroplethrZip <https://github.com/arilamstein/choroplethrZip> which contains a shapefile and metadata on US Zip codes. It is currently hosted on github, has a tagged version number (v1.0.0) and passes R CMD check as verified by Travis. My plan is to use this in the next version of my package choroplethr <https://github.com/arilamstein/choroplethr>.
This is exactly what I have done in the past with other map/data packages (notably choroplethrMaps <https://github.com/arilamstein/choroplethrMaps> and choroplethrAdmin1 <https://github.com/arilamstein/choroplethrAdmin1>), and is the architecture that CRAN requested: large data in a separate package, listing it in the 'Suggests', and putting code like this where appropriate: if (!requireNamespace("choroplethrAdmin1", quietly = TRUE)) { stop("Package choroplethrAdmin1 is needed for this function to work. Please install it.", call. = FALSE) } The problem I now face is that choroplethrZip is too large to be hosted on CRAN (~75MB), and I am unclear on the best way to manage this dependency. Presumably I could just change the above message to say Please install choropltherZip by typing: library(devtools) install_github('arilamstein/choroplethr@v1.0.0') But I don't know if this is the best way to do this, or if there is anything else to consider. I have never had to manage package dependencies outside of CRAN, and have always thought of CRAN as being a "closed ecosystem", where there were not any dependencies outside of CRAN. Can anyone provide guidance on this? Thanks. Ari [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
