Shy Suggestion?

Roger D Peng writes:

I think the reason is that the standard for 'R CMD check' is that
examples in help pages are guaranteed to be executable by the user (as
long as the requirements are met).  There is no way to guarantee this
without having the packages installed.  So strictly speaking, the
'Suggested' packages are not needed by the *user*, but are needed by
the *maintainer*.

Perhaps, you differ with the standard itself, but I personally think
it's a good one.

Those who really want to run R CMD check without forcing the suggestions
can do so via setting the "internal" environment variable
_R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_ to something "false", the test is via

  if(!identical(as.logical(Sys.getenv("_R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_")),
                FALSE))

If people feel very strongly about this, we could turn this into a check
profile variable to be set in ~/.R/check.conf.  Personally, both as a
developer and a CRAN maintainer I see little need in not forcing the
suggested packages at check time, as in both scenarios I prefer to act
as defensively as possible.

-k