We are working on a resubmission of a package
(https://github.com/glmmTMB/glmmTMB/issues/721 for people who want all
the gory details). Our last hurdle is that one of the packages in
"Suggests:", DHARMa, is currently unavailable on Solaris, even though it
in good standing on CRAN
<https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DHARMa/index.html>. (This stems
from a circular dependency: DHARMa can't be built on Solaris because the
_previous_ version of glmmTMB, which DHARMa imports, had a bug on
Solaris ...)
We have been testing on r-hub's solaris platform, where DHARMa is
similarly unavailable. We can only pass tests if we set
_R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_=false; otherwise we get an error that says some
suggested packages are missing.
It is my understanding that the CRAN maintainers can either
* test with _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_=false and yell at us if we have
used any missing/unavailable packages unconditionally or
* test with _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_=true and ensure that all
suggested packages are installed
but that it would be unreasonable to reject package A because it has a
Suggests: dependency on package B that is in good standing on CRAN but
is not available on a particular CRAN testing platform, as long as
package A only uses package B conditionally.
Thoughts/opinions/evidence?
cheers
Ben Bolker
---
From the current CRAN policy:
Packages on which a CRAN package depends should be available from a
mainstream repository: if any mentioned in ‘Suggests’ or ‘Enhances’
fields are not from such a repository, where to obtain them at a
repository should be specified in an ‘Additional_repositories’ field of
the DESCRIPTION file (as a comma-separated list of repository URLs) or
for other means of access, described in the ‘Description’ field.
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.)
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