I am also in favor for keeping the ability of installing directory structures that are partly empty. I've used it before to setup templates that can conveniently be copied recursively to a local path. I did noticed that R CMD INSTALL gave a warning about empty directories before (or was it a NOTE by R CMD check?).
/Henrik On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Pages, Herve <hpa...@fhcrc.org> wrote: > Hi, > > It's unfortunate that with recent revisions of R 2.13 (this > appeared in revision 54640, March 2), 'R CMD build' now removes > empty dirs in the package. People might have good reasons for > having empty dirs in their packages. For example, in Bioconductor, > we have some tools to automatically generate annotation packages > and those tools are implemented in software packages that use > templates for the annotation packages to be generated. Those > package templates are stored under the inst/ folder of the > software package. One of those software packages is the > AnnotationDbi package: it contains 41 package templates under > inst/: > > [hpages@latitude Rpacks]$ ls AnnotationDbi/inst/AnnDbPkg-templates/ > AFFYHUEX.DB CHIMP.DB MALARIA.DB WORM.DB > ANOPHELES.DB COELICOLOR.DB MOUSECHIP.DB XENOPUSCHIP.DB > ARABIDOPSISCHIP.DB ECOLICHIP.DB MOUSE.DB XENOPUS.DB > ARABIDOPSIS.DB ECOLI.DB ORGANISM.DB YEASTCHIP.DB > BASEPKG.DB FLYCHIP.DB PFAM.DB YEAST.DB > BOVINECHIP.DB FLY.DB PIGCHIP.DB YEASTNCBI.DB > BOVINE.DB GO.DB PIG.DB ZEBRAFISHCHIP.DB > CANINECHIP.DB HUMANCHIP.DB RATCHIP.DB ZEBRAFISH.DB > CANINE.DB HUMAN.DB RAT.DB > CHICKENCHIP.DB INPARANOID.DB RHESUS.DB > CHICKEN.DB KEGG.DB WORMCHIP.DB > > Those package templates are just the skeletons of the hundreds of > annotation packages that we generate. Of course, each of them contains > empty subfolders. > > Having 'R CMD build' remove those empty subfolders breaks all the > tools that make use of those package templates. > > Maybe I've missed it but I didn't see any mention of this "feature" > on this list and the fact that it was added only 6 weeks before the > next R and Bioconductor releases is only making this worse. > > I hope this "feature" can be reverted. Why would people or our build > system need to start using R CMD build --keep-empty-dirs just to get > a source tarball right? > > Thanks, > H. > > PS: This page > > http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/doc/html/NEWS.html > > (referenced from http://developer.r-project.org/) has not been > updated for months. > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
