declaring package dependencies

Matthew Dowle <mdowle <at> mdowle.plus.com> writes:

I'm a little surprised by this thread.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds of changes to NEWS (as Dirk mentioned) and 
that's been pretty informative in the past :
http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html

Mainly though, I submit to winbuilder before submitting to CRAN, as the 
CRAN policies advise.  winbuilder's R-devel seems to be built daily, 
saving me the time. Since I don't have Windows it kills two birds with 
one stone.  It has caught many problems for me before submitting to CRAN 
and I can't remember it ever not responding in a reasonable time.
http://win-builder.r-project.org/upload.aspx

I've suggested before that winbuilder could be the mechanism to submit 
to CRAN rather than an ftp upload to incoming.  Only if winbuilder 
passed OK on R-devel could it then go to a human.   But iirc there was a 
technical difficulty preventing this.

Matthew

I was planning to write a careful e-mail to CRAN suggesting
essentially this, and I may yet do so, but for now I'll just chime in
and "+1" this.  Yihui Xie made a very similar suggestion sometime
last year (I think).  It would seem so much easier for everyone,
package maintainers *and* CRAN maintainers, to have an automatic
filter of this sort, and I can't figure out any downside other than
needing slightly more computer power (which surely must be a reasonable
tradeoff for fewer human resources!), *if* having the
auto-filter made people sloppier about checking before submitting.
   Do you happen to remember what the technical difficulty was?
If I were a CRAN maintainer (thank goodness I'm not!), overcoming
it would be one of my top priorities ...

  Ben Bolker