[R-pkg-team] Bug#912254: Wrong culprit

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Gordon,

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 02:01:55PM +0000, Gordon Ball wrote:
> I turns out I picked up on the wrong origin for the HTML in this
> package. It's not from `pkgdown`; that is just used to generate their
> upstream website and isn't shipped in the CRAN tarball. Mea culpa.
> 
> The HTML in this case (`inst/doc/*.html`) appears in fact to be
> generated by RMarkdown when upstream built this package, from the
> corresponding files in `vignettes/*.Rmd`.
> 
> Two of these documents (`extending-ggplot2` and `ggplot2-specs`) contain
> only a short code highlighting script (inserted by Pandoc) and a
> generated link to Mathjax. These links are likely to be common to any
> RMarkdown documentation prebuilt by upstream. They could be fixed by
> regex, but these HTML files are in any case not source and should be
> removed (and ideally rebuilt).
> 
> `profiling` contains a huge pile of minified javascript, which appears
> to be generated by the `profvis` library. This generates an HTML widget
> in the RMarkdown output including all the necessary inlined libraries.
> Rebuilding this vignette would be hard, but I think is probably of
> pretty marginal interest.
> 
> `dh-r` already supports rebuilding vignettes (`dh $@ --buildsystem R --with
> vignette`), but this functionality has never been much tested or used, I
> think. It means adding a bunch of extra build dependencies (either
> pandoc or texlive, depending on the output format, in addition to any
> extra packages needed for the vignette). I also doesn't currently have
> any mechanism to only build a subset of vignettes if some are known to
> break, require exotic dependencies of take too long to run. I'm a bit
> concerned that trying to enable this more broadly is a bit of a rabbit
> hole which risks making a lot of packages slower and more flaky to
> build.

If you ask me the extra Build-Depends and extra processing power needed
is rectified by the extra testing the package gets.  If we value the
documentation that has to be deleted due to included non-free code high
enough I would consider it a good idea to regenerate it.

Kind regards

     Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de