R devel - Aug 2024 - Apply .Rbuildignore before copying files in R CMD build

Hi,

Is there any reason why .Rbuildignore is not used before copying package
files in R CMD build?

For some of the packages I develop I have rather large directories with
miscellaneous files for testing and other purposes. They are in my
.Rbuildignore (and .gitignore) file, but that doesn't prevent R CMD build
from trying to copy them on the build process. Having them copied either
breaks the build completely because /tmp directory gets out of space, or
just slows it down a lot. So I wonder if there is a specific reason for
this behavior and whether it could be change or controlled by some
parameter.

There is some discussion in the context of pkgbuild package:
https://github.com/r-lib/pkgbuild/issues/59 It provides a hackish
workaround for that, which also does not work on Windows.

Best,
Alexey

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On 2024-08-28 5:59 p.m., Alexey Sergushichev wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is there any reason why .Rbuildignore is not used before copying package
> files in R CMD build?
> 
> For some of the packages I develop I have rather large directories with
> miscellaneous files for testing and other purposes. They are in my
> .Rbuildignore (and .gitignore) file, but that doesn't prevent R CMD
build
> from trying to copy them on the build process. Having them copied either
> breaks the build completely because /tmp directory gets out of space, or
> just slows it down a lot. So I wonder if there is a specific reason for
> this behavior and whether it could be change or controlled by some
> parameter.
> 
> There is some discussion in the context of pkgbuild package:
> https://github.com/r-lib/pkgbuild/issues/59 It provides a hackish
> workaround for that, which also does not work on Windows.
I think the reason is simplicity.  The build process can add, delete or 
modify files.  You wouldn't want that to happen on the original source 
files, so R copies the files to a temporary location to run things.

If it applied .Rbuildignore first, then important files for the build 
might not be available, and the build could fail.

Having an R package that needs so much data that you can't fit two 
copies of it on your disk is a really unusual situation.  I think it 
will have to be up to you to fix it (by increasing your temp space, or 
decreasing the size of some of those files, or something else).

Duncan Murdoch

Hi Alexey,

It's kind of gross, but if you need a local solution, you could put
your own executable `cp` script on your PATH somewhere, and have that
do something "smart" when it's invoked by R. One way to detect
that
would be to check if the `R_CMD` environment variable is set. For
example:

https://gist.github.com/kevinushey/2351194ba540627831fa2d58073c097a

For posterity, this was filed some time ago on R's bug tracker at:

https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17549

Best,
Kevin


On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 3:00?PM Alexey Sergushichev <alsergbox at
gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Is there any reason why .Rbuildignore is not used before copying package
> files in R CMD build?
>
> For some of the packages I develop I have rather large directories with
> miscellaneous files for testing and other purposes. They are in my
> .Rbuildignore (and .gitignore) file, but that doesn't prevent R CMD
build
> from trying to copy them on the build process. Having them copied either
> breaks the build completely because /tmp directory gets out of space, or
> just slows it down a lot. So I wonder if there is a specific reason for
> this behavior and whether it could be change or controlled by some
> parameter.
>
> There is some discussion in the context of pkgbuild package:
> https://github.com/r-lib/pkgbuild/issues/59 It provides a hackish
> workaround for that, which also does not work on Windows.
>
> Best,
> Alexey
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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