Using rstan in an R package generates R CMD CHECK NOTEs

General
1

We are currently trying to create an R package that internally uses rstan. We have followed the guidance documents for rstantools and everything is working as expected except for the fact that R CMD CHECK now generates two NOTES namely:

❯ checking installed package size ... NOTE
    installed size is 57.4Mb
    sub-directories of 1Mb or more:
      libs  56.0Mb

❯ checking for GNU extensions in Makefiles ... NOTE
  GNU make is a SystemRequirements.

My understanding from another thread is that these can safely be ignored. However as we are submitting our package to CRAN I was wondering if it would be possible to get a general description or something we could point to in our cran-comments file that explains why these are necessary? The reason I ask is that I believe you are supposed to provide an explanation for any unresolved NOTEs when submitting a package to CRAN.

Thank you for any help you can provide

EDIT:

For reference our package can be found here

2

The libs directory NOTE is pretty common for any R package that uses Rcpp (which is what rstan uses to compile models), as that is where the compiled model object is stored. This is also mentioned in this SO comment from Rcpp's maintainer as a common note that isn’t likely to cause issues with CRAN.

It’s a similar story for the GNU make note. GNU make is needed for handling the Makevars files that rstantools uses to compile the packages Stan models. It’s fairly commonly used for R packages with more complex Makefile needs, and is not likely to cause issues with CRAN

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3

Thank you for the clarification ! :)

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