R devel - Sep 2019 - R CMD build should fail early for old package versions?

Hi all,

Today I had an R CMD build that failed while building a vignette because
the vignette needs tidyr (>= 1.0, declared in DESCRIPTION Suggests) but my
system had a previous version installed.

It did not take me too long to figure out the issue (solved by upgrading
tidyr) but it would have been even faster / easier if R CMD build failed
early, with an error message that says something like "Can not build
package XXX because it Suggests: tidyr (>= 1.0) but tidyr 0.8.3 is
installed"

Is that possible?

Toby

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On 30/09/2019 5:25 p.m., Toby Hocking wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Today I had an R CMD build that failed while building a vignette because
> the vignette needs tidyr (>= 1.0, declared in DESCRIPTION Suggests) but
my
> system had a previous version installed.
> 
> It did not take me too long to figure out the issue (solved by upgrading
> tidyr) but it would have been even faster / easier if R CMD build failed
> early, with an error message that says something like "Can not build
> package XXX because it Suggests: tidyr (>= 1.0) but tidyr 0.8.3 is
> installed"
> 
> Is that possible?
If you list a package in Suggests, your package should work (perhaps 
with some limitations) without the suggested one.  Unfortunately for 
you, the limitation "can't rebuild the vignettes" is incompatible
with
building the package, but I don't think there's anything you can put in 
the DESCRIPTION file to indicate this.

Duncan Murdoch