Are you sure the issue that CRAN has is the library sizes, and not
the issues flagged by the "LTO" platform
<https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/LTO/README.txt> ?
https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/LTO/rar.out
I would check with CRAN for clarification before you spend a lot of
time trying to reduce package sizes. As you point out, lots of packages
on CRAN have package sizes large enough to trigger this note -- it is my
impression that CRAN only object if the large package size is considered
unnecessary; some of the *inappropriate* reasons for large package size
are listed in the repository policy
<https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html>
===
Packages should be of the minimum necessary size. Reasonable compression
should be used for data (not just .rda files) and PDF documentation:
CRAN will if necessary pass the latter through qpdf.
As a general rule, neither data nor documentation should exceed 5MB
(which covers several books). A CRAN package is not an appropriate way
to distribute course notes, and authors will be asked to trim their
documentation to a maximum of 5MB.
Where a large amount of data is required (even after compression),
consideration should be given to a separate data-only package which can
be updated only rarely (since older versions of packages are archived in
perpetuity).
Similar considerations apply to other forms of “data”, e.g., .jar files.
Source package tarballs should if possible not exceed 10MB. It is much
preferred that third-party source software should be included within the
package (as e.g. a vendor.tar.xz file) than be downloaded at
installation: if this requires a larger tarball a modestly increased
limit can be requested at submission.
====
On 2024-01-20 2:38 p.m., Johann Gaebler wrote:
Hi everyone,
I received the following message regarding `rar`
<https://cran.r-project.org/package=rar>, a package that I put up on CRAN two
days ago:
Dear maintainer,
Please see the problems shown on
<https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_rar.html>.
Please correct before 2024-02-02 to safely retain your package on CRAN.
The issue is that the compiled libraries are too large. The Mac CRAN checks
turned up the following note:
installed size is 8.9Mb
sub-directories of 1Mb or more:
libs 8.7Mb
I have not been able to reproduce the issue either locally or on any machine I
have ready access to. I have built it on some of the Rhub and R-Project build
systems, and the same issue (with very different `libs` sizes) came up on some
of them:
• (RHub) Ubuntu Linux 20.04.1 LTS, R-release, GCC: 18.2Mb,
• (RHub) Fedora Linux, R-devel, clang, gfortran: 6.8Mb,
• (R-Project) r-release-macosx-arm64: 8.5Mb.
Based on trying to read up about this, it seems that this is a pretty common problem
<http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/14/#009_compact_shared_libraries>
for compiled packages because of debugging symbols getting inserted into the shared
library file. Using the fix from that blog post where you modify the Makevars to
strip debugging symbols from the shared library seems to solve the issue on those
build systems, so I feel reasonably confident that this is what’s going on.
Apparently many, many existing packages on CRAN have the same issue. However,
I’m very new to R package development, so I’m not exactly sure what to do. I
have two questions:
1. Is there anything I need to “fix” here, or should I just make contact with
the CRAN folks and bring the fact that this is being caused by debugging
symbols to their attention?
2. Regardless of whether or not I have to fix this issue for CRAN, is there a
way to strip out the debugging symbols that comports with CRAN policies? The
method suggested in the blog post above (adding a phony target in `Makevars`
that strips the shared library) seems not to be CRAN-compliant, but I could be
mistaken about that. (In particular, I had to modify it locally to get it to
run, so I’m not sure what the platform-independent version of it looks like.)
Thanks in advance for the help!
Sincerely,
Johann D. Gaebler
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