R devel - Dec 2018 - Package 'tools' support for linux binary packages?

I may have a deployment reason at work for Linux binary packages as created
by `R CMD INSTALL --build src`.  Using the example of my digest package this
creates eg

  digest_0.6.18.1_R_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

where 'x86_64-pc-linux-gnu' is also what
`R.version[["platform"]]` returns.

However, once I started to look into supporting this via my repository helper
package `drat`, I realized that the `tools::write_PACKAGES` function only
supports the three file types `drat` already knows about: source, and mac and
windows binaries.
>From the help page
    Usage:

         write_PACKAGES(dir = ".", fields = NULL,
                        type = c("source", "mac.binary",
"win.binary"),
                        verbose = FALSE, unpacked = FALSE, subdirs = FALSE,
                        latestOnly = TRUE, addFiles = FALSE, rds_compress =
"xz")
 
    [...]

        type: Type of packages: currently source ?.tar.{gz,bz2,xz}?
              archives, and macOS or Windows binary (?.tgz? or ?.zip?,
              respectively) packages are supported.  Defaults to
              ?"win.binary"? on Windows and to ?"source"?
otherwise.

Would it make sense to add eg "lin.binary" ?

Or is that a bad idea because the binary packages do not have dependencies
etc encoded so that I may be better off punting with simpler helper functions
to 'push' to a directory and 'pull' from it where it just
matches the largest
release version number given a package name (and maybe platform) ?

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org