Chicken-and-egg NAMESPACE problem with Roxygen2, `devtools::check()`, and Rcpp

[dbaston]

Running devtools::check() on a project that uses Rcpp fails if the NAMESPACE file does not exist:

> devtools::check()
Updating wsim.lsm documentation
Loading wsim.lsm
Error in Rcpp::compileAttributes() : 
  pkgdir must refer to the directory containing an R package

To generate the NAMESPACE file, I need to run devtools::document(). But this also invokes Rcpp, which in turn fails because the NAMESPACE file does not exist:

> devtools::document()
Updating wsim.lsm documentation
Loading wsim.lsm
Error in Rcpp::compileAttributes() : 
  pkgdir must refer to the directory containing an R package

It's not enough to run touch NAMESPACE before build, because Roxygen2 will only replace a NAMESPACE file that it generated. For now, I papered this over with a hackish Makefile:

NAMESPACE:
	echo "# Generated by roxygen2: do not edit by hand" > NAMESPACE

check: NAMESPACE
	Rscript -e "devtools::check()"

But I wonder if devtools could take care of this somehow? Since NAMESPACE is autogenerated by Roxygen2, I don't want to commit it to the repository.

[jimhester]

You should just commit the NAMESPACE file, not doing so makes it more difficult for others to install your package without any real material gain.

[wch]

There are pros and cons of committing generated files to a repository. The stance taken in devtools is that the files in the repo can be given to R CMD build to create a source or binary R package. This means that some generated files, like NAMESPACE file and the .Rd files, are part of the repository. Others, like .so and .dll files, are not, because they are created during the build phase.

Another reason for having those files be committed to the repository is so that when a version that has been released to CRAN is tagged, that tag represents the set of files that was used to create the source package that was submitted to CRAN. If the NAMESPACE and .Rd files are not part of the repository, there's no guarantee that they'll be the same when you generate them in the future, because roxygen2 may behave differently, and because the .Rd files might inherit information from other packages, and the other packages can change.

[lock]

This old issue has been automatically locked. If you believe you have found a related problem, please file a new issue (with reprex) and link to this issue. https://reprex.tidyverse.org/