[R-pkg-devel] R CMD check NOTE - Long paths in package

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 4:16 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

On 12 October 2015 at 13:13, Charles Determan wrote:
| Greetings,
|
| I have a package which provides headers for a C++ library (similar to the
| BH package).  However, the C++ library has some heavily nested components
| within its' structure so when I run R CMD check I get the following NOTE:
|
| Tarballs are only required to store paths of up to 100 bytes and cannot
| store those of more than 256 bytes, with restrictions including to 100
| bytes for the final component.
|
| Is this a major problem?

Yes.

| As this is a 'NOTE' I am under the impression
| that the long paths are not critical but I want to make sure.

Wrong.

'BH' is called 'BH', believe it or not, to save a few letters, or else I
would have a dozen or more files complain for the very same reason (and CRAN
reject it for non-suitable path/filenames).  Hence not 'BoostHeaders' but
just 'BH'. And see the ChangeLog of BH and revel in how _each_ release has to
rename one of the Runge-Kutta integration files to make the 'net' path length
be suitable for R packing.

There is no point in ignoring the output of R CMD check unless you _really_
know better.

  But is it worth asking if the NOTE's restriction could be lifted,
given that from what I read on wikipedia that the "tar" file format
has been happy with long path names since 2001? Given that R-Core/CRAN
sometimes refer to R versions from a year ago as "obsolete", how can
they complain about sticking with a file format restriction from the
last century? I've just happily made a tar file with a path that is
1300 chars long containing a file with a name of 160 chars .

  Or are there still old versions of tar around, or other file systems
with restrictive naming practices (in which case the error should be
about the names/paths of the files themselves, not that old versions
of tar can't cope with them)?

  It now seems to have bothered at least two people and Dirk sounds
like he's had to implement a little hack to keep the path names down.

Barry