On Sat, 10 Nov 2018, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
On Sat, 10 Nov 2018 at 19:12, Roger Bivand <[email protected]> wrote:
My point exactly. It should only run R RHOME to check for the existence of
R (if this is what it does) at run time, not at install time. If it then,
at run time, does not find R, or having found R does not find knitr
(though Sweave is part of utils, so knitr is only needed by those using
knitr to weave Rnw documents, or to convert from Rmd), it should issue
helpful error messages to tell the user to install R, or to install knitr
within R. By requiring to see R when being run by root/admin at install
time, it is making invasive assumptions about the user environment.
It could be that the texlive-includernw package itself does not require
install time dependency fulfillment, and that this is something only the
Fedora texlive packager has mis-understood.
Texlive packages don't require anything at build time, so Andreas has
nothing to do with this issue. The description of his package claims
that R and knitr are required at run time, so the Fedora packager (Tom
'spot' Callaway, in CC now) had to take a decision: either to avoid
non-texlive dependencies, which results in a broken installation
(texlive-includernw won't work without R), or to be more user-friendly
and install all the required run time dependencies.
It is not "broken", it would be in the same situation as an R package
user who had installed a package, but not its Suggested: dependencies. On
running examples or tests from that R package, the code using the absent
package would either be skipped, probably with a message or warning, or
would lead to an error message suggesting which packages to install. None
of this needs to be done at install time (install.packages(...,
dependencies=TRUE) is not the default).
I've now located the source of includernw.sty, and can see possible
improvements (if I can find out how to test the string length of `R RHOME`
and equivalently trying to request("knitr") in a found R instance back to
latex to throw an informative error.
Tom took the second path, as he did too with texlive-graphicxpsd, for
instance, which requires ImageMagick. Of course, this doesn't work for
you, but admittedly, having an R installation under your home
directory is not a typical case. I don't know whether there's any
official packaging guideline about this (i.e., non-texlive
dependencies vs. installing non-working texlive packages). If not, you
could ask Tom to reconsider his decision.
I will do this, and also try to get includernw de-listed from the schemes
and collections affected (restoring the status quo, and also permitting
includernw to hard-depend on whatever packagers found required.
Roger
Iñaki
--
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: [email protected]
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140
https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en
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