[tex-live] inclusion of texlive-includernw

[Roger Bivand]

Hi Norbert,

On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, Norbert Preining wrote:

> Hi Roger,
>
>> I accept that packages are rule makers and those installing packages are
>> rule takers in general.
>
> It is a necessity. Consider the average linux distribution with about
> 20000 packages or more, where R is just a very small part of it.
> One needs rules that govern the package usability.
>

OK. I also see that say texlive has internal dependencies between 
components, like R. R has > 13000 contributed packages on CRAN, and almost 
3000 more on Bioconductor, and we've been very concerned to prune reverse 
dependency trees to limit installation of more than is strictly needed 
even if some functionality is inhibited. We do this to permit nightly
cross-platform checking of all contributed packages hosted on CRAN.

>> I'm only questioning this particular case, as I'm convinced that, after an
>> R.core installation triggered by a dependency in includernw on R-knitr and
>> its R package dependency, trying to build the latex in R chunks in the Rnw
>> file will fail, because they in turn try to load other R packages that are
>> not available.
>
> This is then a packaging bug. If the maintainer wants to ensure full
> functionality, the dependency on R-knitr needs to pull in either
> directly or indirectly everything necessary for running at least a
> minimal document (I don't say it needs to pull in everything that might
> be possible at all under any conceivable situation, though!).
>
> If even the most simple case of document cannot be compiled after
> installation despite installing parts of R, this is a bug of the package
> and should be reported to the maintainer.

It passes this test (loading knitr), but almost any workflow will need 
other sets of packages, depending on the R code in the Rnw document being 
processed (which cannot be known before run time).

>
>> I've bowed to your position as rule maker and mine as rule taker and used
>> PATH to avoid finding the spuriously installed R version.
>
> That is not my rule. That has been the rule since the conceivment of
> Unix, long before I was born.

OK, my unix admin certification is from Sperry in 1985 (2MB memory, System 
V). At the time, EMACS really did mean Eight Megabytes And Constant 
Swapping.

Thanks for your patience,

Roger

>
> Best
>
> Norbert
>
> --
> PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
> Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140
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