Are suggested dependencies mandatory in context of R CMD check when using env var _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_=FALSE?
Suggested dependencies are nice because are optional.
But that feature often isn't valid when trying to run R CMD check on them.
I would like to use export _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_=FALSE, which according to the comment in tools/R/check.R#L3989:L3994
The suggested packages are required for a complete check.
Checking can be attempted without them by setting the environment variable _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_ to a false value.
should be sufficient to run check process without installing suggested deps.
If it is not true, then how to differentiate the suggested packages which are optional from those mandatory?
It would be helpful to have kind of vignetteBuilder DESCRIPTION field called testChecker, so DESCRIPTION file could precisely manage packages dependencies.
That way batch checking packages would be easier, as required dep metadata would be at hand in description file. Batch checking rev-dep pkgs with all their suggests will simply result into testing whole CRAN.
I've handled in the code with if (requireNamespace(.)) test_package(.) for testthat and knitr, also with mocking up .Rout files.
But I'm interested into canonical design of a suggested package and _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_ env var.
Is there any R core dev team recommendation/suggestion on that?
[email protected]. I'd say that only a small fraction of R Core read SO. – Selfinduction