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Message-ID: <17200.12808.872332.67431@mithrandir.hornik.net>
Date: 2005-09-20T16:00:08Z
From: Kurt Hornik
Subject: Shy Suggestion?
In-Reply-To: <433016C6.3090100@jhsph.edu>

>>>>> 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