documentation-for-developers/first-time-setup.md

In Melinae/TabularManifest: Tabular Manifest

These notes are to hep potential contributors get their development machines set up correctly to build the package. It's also to help me remember how to do it if I switch to another computer. Nothing mysterious -just little things to save 10 minutes here and there. Unfortunately it's not as easy as installing R and RStudio and clicking Build.

R

Install the latest version of R. Before a version is submitted to CRAN, the CRAN maintainers prefer you use the patched version of R, or even the development version. These links point to the windows versions. If you're running Linux, you probably already know how to get the right version, and there's not a simple URL I can link to.

RStudio

Although other R IDEs are available, using RStudio will be easier when developing the package, since that the major link of the tool chain I'm used to.

Rtools

Rtools is the main thing that builds and checks the package being developed. CRAN maintainers like you to run the most recent version. This is necessary for if you have a Windows OS.

LaTeX software

For Windows, the consensus seemed to be MiKTeX. The full version is huge, and contains almost every possible package (LaTeX has a package system similar to R and Linux). If you install something other than the full version, and a document requires a package you don't have, it will simply prompt you to download it.

qpdf

qpdf is a command line tool that R BUILD calls. You'll never call it directly. It is used to make see if the documentation pdfs can be further compressed to save additional space. For Windows, download the zipped file from sourceforge and copy it into a permanent location (eg, in the /Program Files/ directory.)

The location of the bin directory should be added to the OS's "PATH" environmental variable, so the executable can be found. At the time of this writing, I added C:\Program Files\qpdf-5.0.1\bin;. Make sure a semicolon is separating it from all the stuff before it in the PATH variable. Make sure the version number (eg, "5.0.1") matches the version of your current installation. Apparently I needed to reboot my computer for the new path entry to be recognized (see a stack exchanage explanation for tedious details); restarting RStudio didn't work.

If you don't install qpdf correctly, you'll likely receive the error message WARNING 'qpdf' is needed for checks on size reduction of PDFs when running R CHECK with the --as-cran- option.

R Packages

We try to keep a current list of all the packages we use in the file /utility_scripts/package_dependencies.R. This is partly for the sake of documentation, and partly so there aren't any surprises for new contributors. Just run this file, and everything should be installed if it's not already. After this script is run the first time, make sure you click the 'Check for Updates' button in the 'Packages' every week or so.

RStudio on Linux

I primarily developed this on Windows 8 with a patched, or development version of R (see the links above), but I also build it on a Ubuntu 13.04 box on my network through a browser to RStudio. This is to make sure I'm not introducing any problems on Linux. I didn't record what I did initially (I'll do that the next time I start fresh). Here are some recent steps I needed to do for the LaTeX reference manual to build correctly.

sudo apt-get install texinfo
sudo apt-get install texlive
sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-extra

See texi2dvi missing](https://github.com/yihui/knitr/issues/214) and textlive-fonts-extra for installing. See the R CMD Rd2pdf for getting better error messages than R CMD check.

SVN

SVN is necessary if you want to commit to R-Forge (otherwise, just download the release version from CRAN and the development version from GitHub). When a directory is deleted, using the command line to first update and then delete works for me.

$ svn update doc

$ svn delete doc
$ svn commit -m "Deleted directory 'inst/doc'."

Help me add more to this

This document is mostly from memory, except for the qpdf which was a waste of 10 minutes of re-googling. There's probably other stuff I've forgotten, that would cost time. If so, please tell me and I'll add it here.

Melinae/TabularManifest documentation built on April 22, 2024, 11:39 p.m.