how to list external dependencies (i.e., non-R packages)?

From: "Kasper Daniel Hansen" <kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com>
To: "Greg Minshall" <minshall at acm.org>
Cc: "r-devel" <r-devel at r-project.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2014 1:08:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Rd] how to list external dependencies (i.e., non-R packages)?

Several packages in Bioconductor (and possibly CRAN) uses
  SystemRequirements
in DESCRIPTION, but unless the user reads the DESCRIPTION file, this
is for
naught.  Still useful to some people I think.

Best,
Kasper


On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:13 PM, Greg Minshall <minshall at acm.org>
wrote:

hi.  i'm working on a package which only works if one (or both) of
two
libraries (Imlib2 and MagickWand) exist on the machine on which the
package is compiled and executed.  as currently written, the
program
purposely generates an error at *compile* time if neither library
is
available (thinking the earlier the user is notified, the less
frustrating).

is there a way of specifying this dependency in, say, the
DESCRIPTION
file?  (seems unlikely, as this is what the whole
autotools/configure.ac
framework is supposed to deal with.)

or, should i take out the compile time error (maybe replace my
#error
with a #warning), and just generate at error at run time?  (this
will
require me to figure out what that means for build tests/, but
obviously
some sort of hack is doable.)

cheers, Greg

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