R Package with Large Size External Assets

Question

This is a followup to a question I posted earlier. To summarize, I am writing an R Package called Slidify, which makes use of several external non-R based libraries. My earlier question was about how to manage dependencies.

Several solutions were proposed, of which the most attractive solution was to package the external libraries as a different R package, and make it a dependency for Slidify. This is the strategy followed by the package xlsx, which packages the java dependencies as a different package xlsxjars.

An alterative is for me to provide the external libraries as a download and package a install_libraries function within Slidify, which would automatically fetch the required files and download it into the package directory. I can also add an update_libraries function which would update if things change.

My question is, are there any specific advantages to doing the CRAN dance for external libraries which are not R based. Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

As discussed in the comment-thread, for a package like slidify with a number of large, (mostly) fixed, and portable files, a "resource" package makes more sense:

• you will know the path where it installed (as the package itself will tell you)
• users can't accidentally put it somewhere else
• you get CRAN tests
• you get CRAN distribution, mirrors, ...
• users already know install.packages() etc
• the more nimble development of your package using these fixed parts is not held back by the large support files