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[R-pkg-devel] Package required but not available: ‘arrow’

7 messages · Duncan Murdoch, Jan van der Laan, Dénes Tóth +3 more

Original
Park, Sung Jae
# 
Hi,

I?m writing to seek assistance regarding an issue we?re encountering during the submission process of our new package to CRAN.
The package in question is currently working smoothly on R CMD check on Windows; however, we are facing a specific error when running R CMD check on Debian. The error message we?ve got from CRAN is as follows:

```
? checking package dependencies ... ERROR
  Package required but not available: ?arrow?

  See section ?The DESCRIPTION file? in the ?Writing R Extensions?
manual.
```

We have ensured that the ?arrow? package is properly listed in DESCRIPTION file under the ?Imports:?.
Could you please provide guidance on how to resolve this? Any help will be valuable.

Thank you in advance.

Best,
--Sungjae
Duncan Murdoch
# 
If you look on the CRAN check results for arrow, you'll see it has 
errors on the Linux platforms that use clang, and can't be installed there.

For you to deal with this, you should make arrow into a suggested 
package, and if it is missing, work around that without generating an 
error.  Another choice would be to work with the arrow developers to get 
it to install on the systems where it fails now, but it's a big package, 
so that would likely be a lot harder.

Duncan Murdoch
On 21/02/2024 5:15 p.m., Park, Sung Jae wrote:
Jan van der Laan
# 
This error indicates that the arrow package is unavailable on the system 
where your package is checked. At 
https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_arrow.html you can 
see that the arrow package is currently not working with clang on fedora 
an debian. This is not something that you can fix. All you can do is 
report this with the arrow maintainers if it is not already reported, 
and wait until this is fixed.

HTH,
Jan
On 21-02-2024 23:15, Park, Sung Jae wrote:
Dénes Tóth
# 
Depending on your use case you can also take a look at the nanoarrow 
package (https://cran.r-project.org/package=nanoarrow). Maybe it 
provides all the features you need and has a much smaller footprint than 
'arrow'.

Best,
Denes
On 2/22/24 10:01, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
Park, Sung Jae
# 
Thank you so much for all of you! I haven?t thought that ?arrow? package itself will have an error.
Since ?arrow? package isn?t a crucial component of our package, I made ?arrow? package into ?Suggests? and update cran-comment.md accordingly.
I appreciate your advice once again.

Best,
--Sungjae

From: D?nes T?th <toth.denes at kogentum.hu>
Date: Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 6:47?AM
To: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>, Park, Sung Jae <spark7 at ufl.edu>, r-package-devel at r-project.org <r-package-devel at r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] Package required but not available: ?arrow?
[External Email]

Depending on your use case you can also take a look at the nanoarrow
package (https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcran.r-project.org%2Fpackage%3Dnanoarrow&data=05%7C02%7Cspark7%40ufl.edu%7C1e2fd4f4cb684488106208dc339c0e93%7C0d4da0f84a314d76ace60a62331e1b84%7C0%7C0%7C638441992558568835%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=uJO%2BkxcEtEoDRg9ynyEYuOOCjO%2B30L05lwqIaPifijE%3D&reserved=0<https://cran.r-project.org/package=nanoarrow>). Maybe it
provides all the features you need and has a much smaller footprint than
'arrow'.

Best,
Denes
On 2/22/24 10:01, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Nic Crane
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
FWIW the arrow maintainers are aware of this and we submitted a fix to CRAN
a couple of weeks ago, which is currently in the review queue at
https://cran.r-project.org/incoming/pending/

Nic

        
On Thu, 22 Feb 2024 at 09:22, Park, Sung Jae <spark7 at ufl.edu> wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

        

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Dirk Eddelbuettel
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
On 22 February 2024 at 04:01, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

        
| For you to deal with this, you should make arrow into a suggested 
| package,

For what it is worth, that is exactly what package tiledb does.

Yet the Suggests: still lead to a NOTE requiring a human to override which
did not happen until I gently nudged after the 'five work days' had lapsed.

So full agreement that 'in theory' a Suggests: should help and is the weaker
and simpler dependency.  However 'in practice' it can still lead to being
held up up when the weak-dependency package does not build.

[ As for D?nes's point, most if not all the internals in package tiledb are
  actually on nanoarrow but we offer one code path returning an Arrow Table
  object and that requires 'arrow' the package for the instantiation.

  So it really all boils down to 'Lightweight is the right weight' as we say
  over at www.tinyverse.org.  But given that the public API offers an Arrow
  accessor, it is a little late to pull back from it.  And Arrow is a powerful
  and useful tool. Building it, however, can have its issues... ]

Anyway, while poking around the issue when waiting, I was also told by Arrow
developers that the issue (AFAICT a missing header) is fixed, and looking at
CRAN's incoming reveals the package has been sitting there since Feb 8 (see
https://cran.r-project.org/incoming/pending/).  So would be good to hear from
CRAN what if anything is happening here.

Dirk