Thanks to Henrik Bengtsson, Martin Maechler, Brian Ripley, Jeff Gentry and David Brahm for taking the time to answer my questions about INDEX files in R packages.
My key take-aways were: 1) All of this will be changing a lot in R 1.7.0-to-be, so don't sweat the details. 2) Many people run R CMD build before they run R CMD check. I found this quite surprising. I did not realize that R CMD build actually *changes* the contents of your package by, at least, adding an INDEX file if one is not there. I do not see this behavior documented in the help for R CMD build. As a simple example: agate|tmp> ls pyri.check CVS DESCRIPTION R inst man agate|tmp> R CMD build pyri.check * checking for file 'pyri.check/DESCRIPTION' ... OK * preparing 'pyri.check': * checking whether 'INDEX' is up-to-date ... NO * creating new 'INDEX' * removing junk files * building 'pyri.check_1.5.tar.gz' agate|tmp> ls pyri.check CVS INDEX inst DESCRIPTION R man agate|tmp> When I first run R CMD check, I get a warning about the lack of an INDEX. But, since R CMD build creates the index for me, I can now run R CMD check and get no warnings. My mistake was to interpret: "* creating new 'INDEX'" to mean: "Making an INDEX file and putting it in your .gz file while leaving your original package unchanged." Thanks to all for clarifying this for me. Dave Kane -- David Kane Geode Capital Management 617-563-0122 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
