Comments and questions about building packages with rstantools

[jonah]

@martinmodrak

Maybe @jonah can answer this?

Yeah, thanks for tagging me.

@dbarneche Sorry for the slow reply. I hadn’t noticed this post. I’ll try to answer your questions, but first let me say that fishflux is a great package name!

@dbarneche

Should they be kept in the repo, and if not, perhaps rstantools could add them automatically to .gitignore ?

Yes to gitignore. I think that should happen now after Add generated C++ files to .gitignore and .Rbuildignore by mcol · Pull Request #66 · stan-dev/rstantools · GitHub from last month. Although I guess if you add your Stan programs after using rstan_create_package() it might not automatically gitignore the compiled files. We’ll look into that.

@dbarneche

remotes::install_github("nschiett/fishflux") triggers pre-compilation, but we assumed the whole point of using rstantools was to have an entirely compiler-free package? Or did we make the make the wrong assumption?

Good question. You’re only half wrong ;) The intention was to allow users that download your package from CRAN to have a compiler-free experience. Unfortunately install_github() has to install a package from source which means compiling everything. But once your package gets on CRAN users will be able to install the pre-compiled version, so when they do install.packages("fishflux") nothing will need to get compiled. Does that make sense? If you want to enable people to install a pre-compiled version from GitHub you could look into making binary versions of your package available on GitHub using drat.

@dbarneche

At the moment, rstantools dependency needs to be set back to >= 2.0.0 on the DESCRIPTION file (the original rstan_create_package output states >= 2.0.1)

Yeah this was our fault, but will just be temporary. There was a problem with the interaction between StanHeaders and rstantools that we didn’t anticipate and CRAN had to revert rstantools back to 2.0.0.

@dbarneche

Building on this last comment, we also had to install the tbb library on Mac and Linux to get R-CMD-Build and pkgdown GitHub Actions to pass.
[…]
This wasn’t needed on previous versions of rstantools, I think. Any ideas about what is causing this, and could this external dependency somehow be avoided in the future?

Hmm, the tbb library is used by Stan but I’m not sure why anything would have changed between versions of rstantools. @wds15 @bgoodri Any ideas about this?