R devel - Oct 2013 - Compatibility with R 2.15.x: Makefile for (non-Sweave) vignettes in vignettes/?

In R 3.1.0 (~April 2014), support for vignettes in inst/doc/ will go
away (and probably much sooner for CRAN submission), e.g.

checking for old-style vignette sources ... NOTE
Vignette sources only in ?inst/doc?:
?R.devices-overview.tex.rsp?
A ?vignettes? directory is required as from R 3.1.0
and these will not be indexed nor checked

I've been sticking with inst/doc/ for backward compatible reasons so
that I can use a "fallback" inst/doc/Makefile for building
*non*-Sweave vignettes also under R 2.15.x.   AFAIK, it is not
possible to put a Makefile under vignettes/, i.e. it is not possible
to build non-Sweave vignette under vignettes/.

For backward compatible reason, I'd like to keep distributing my
packages on CRAN with non-Sweave vignettes available for R (>2.15.0), not
just R (>= 3.0.0).  Does anyone know an alternative
approach?

/Henrik

Henrik,
On 14/10/2013, at 00:35 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> In R 3.1.0 (~April 2014), support for vignettes in inst/doc/ will go
> away (and probably much sooner for CRAN submission), e.g.
> 
> I've been sticking with inst/doc/ for backward compatible reasons so
> that I can use a "fallback" inst/doc/Makefile for building
> *non*-Sweave vignettes also under R 2.15.x.   AFAIK, it is not
> possible to put a Makefile under vignettes/, i.e. it is not possible
> to build non-Sweave vignette under vignettes/.
> 
You can have Makefile in vignettes, and at the moment this even passes CRAN
tests. You may also need to have a vignettes/.install_extras file to move the
produced non-vignettes files to their final packaged location.

You still get warnings of unused, pointless and misleading files with R 2.15.3,
because R 3.0.2 packaging process makes files that R 2.15.3 regards as pointless
and misleading. The CRAN policy seems to be to ignore those warnings. R is not
backward compatible with herself, and I don't see much that a package author
could do to work around this (apart from forking the package).

Cheers, Jari O.