R devel - Jan 2012 - how to check all CRAN dependencies for my package, before submitting

Suppose I'm author of a package on which quite a few other packages
depend. When I submit to CRAN, I run R CMD check on it, Kurt does that
too, and if things work out fine, it is accepted. When one or more of
the packages that depend on it break because of my changes, however,
hell breaks loose.

I would like to extend my testing (currently: R CMD check pkg) to
running R CMD check on all dependent packages, in their most recent
(CRAN) version. I got stuck trying this.

Does anyone know how to get (i) a list of all packages that depend,
directly or indirectly, on my package, and (ii) a list of file names of
their package sources in their latest version (i.e., including their
latest version number)?
-- 
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of M?nster
Weseler Stra?e 253, 48151 M?nster, Germany. Phone: +49 251
8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763  http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de
http://www.52north.org/geostatistics      e.pebesma at wwu.de

On 18.01.2012 09:28, Edzer Pebesma wrote:
> Suppose I'm author of a package on which quite a few other packages
> depend. When I submit to CRAN, I run R CMD check on it, Kurt does that
> too, and if things work out fine, it is accepted. When one or more of
> the packages that depend on it break because of my changes, however,
> hell breaks loose.
>
> I would like to extend my testing (currently: R CMD check pkg) to
> running R CMD check on all dependent packages, in their most recent
> (CRAN) version. I got stuck trying this.
>
> Does anyone know how to get (i) a list of all packages that depend,
> directly or indirectly, on my package, and (ii) a list of file names of
> their package sources in their latest version (i.e., including their
> latest version number)?

Quick an dirty example:


packages_to_check <- function(dep, which = c("Depends",
"Imports",
"LinkingTo", "Suggests"), recursive = FALSE){
 
download.file("http://cran.R-project.org/web/packages/packages.rds", 
"packages.rds", mode="wb")
     x <- readRDS("packages.rds")
     x <- x[!duplicated(x[,1]),]
     packages <- x[,1]
     rdeps <- tools:::.package_dependencies(packages = dep, x,
                         which = which,
                         recursive = recursive, reverse = TRUE)
     paste(apply(x[x[,1] %in% rdeps[[1]], 1:2], 1, paste,
collapse="_"),
".tar.gz", sep="")
}

result <-  packages_to_check("sp")

or if you want the whole chain including recursive dependencies:

result <-  packages_to_check("sp", recursive=TRUE)


Best,
Uwe