R devel - May 2021 - Testing R build when using --without-recommended-packages?

On 4 May 2021 at 09:31, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
| I'm on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). How do I check an R build when using
| --without-recommended-packages? 'make check' assumes
'recommended'
| packages are installed, so that fails without them available.

[...]

| BTW, isn't this a bug? Shouldn't this example run conditionally on
| 'MASS' being installed, because 'MASS' is a suggested package
here;

The 'R-admin' manual in Section 1.2 "Getting patched and
development
versions" ends on 

  If downloading manually from CRAN, do ensure that you have the correct
  versions of the recommended packages: if the number in the file VERSION
  is ?x.y.z? you need to download the contents of
  ?https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir?, where dir is
  ?x.y.z/Recommended? for r-devel or x.y-patched/Recommended for r-patched,
  respectively, to directory src/library/Recommended in the sources you
  have unpacked. After downloading manually you need to execute
  tools/link-recommended from the top level of the sources to make the
  requisite links in src/library/Recommended. A suitable incantation from
  the top level of the R sources using wget might be (for the correct
  value of dir)

      wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A\*.gz -nd -P src/library/Recommended \
        https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir
      ./tools/link-recommended

Dirk

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

Thanks, but I don't understand. That's what I usually do when I build
R with 'recommended' packages.  But here, I explicitly do *not* want
to build and install 'recommended' packages with the R installation.
So, I'm going down the --without-recommended-packages path on purpose
and I'm looking for a way to validate such an installation.

If your comment is on the 'stats' examples' hard dependency on
'MASS'
despite it's being a suggested packages, I still don't follow.

/Henrik

On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 10:16 AM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
wrote:
>
>
> On 4 May 2021 at 09:31, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> | I'm on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04). How do I check an R build when using
> | --without-recommended-packages? 'make check' assumes
'recommended'
> | packages are installed, so that fails without them available.
>
> [...]
>
> | BTW, isn't this a bug? Shouldn't this example run conditionally
on
> | 'MASS' being installed, because 'MASS' is a suggested
package here;
>
> The 'R-admin' manual in Section 1.2 "Getting patched and
development
> versions" ends on
>
>   If downloading manually from CRAN, do ensure that you have the correct
>   versions of the recommended packages: if the number in the file VERSION
>   is ?x.y.z? you need to download the contents of
>   ?https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir?, where dir is
>   ?x.y.z/Recommended? for r-devel or x.y-patched/Recommended for r-patched,
>   respectively, to directory src/library/Recommended in the sources you
>   have unpacked. After downloading manually you need to execute
>   tools/link-recommended from the top level of the sources to make the
>   requisite links in src/library/Recommended. A suitable incantation from
>   the top level of the R sources using wget might be (for the correct
>   value of dir)
>
>       wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A\*.gz -nd -P src/library/Recommended \
>         https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir
>       ./tools/link-recommended
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org