Recently I submitted visdat to CRAN, and have just submitted naniar to CRAN as well (fingers crossed!).
There were a couple of small things that I changed in order to get everything on CRAN OK, and I thought it might be helfpul to list them here, both for me, and for others, and also for others to comment on.
Package Version too large.
I use pkgdown to make my website docs for visdat and naniar. It’s really nifty, and looks super pro with minimal work from me. The files are a bit weird, so I thought that this error was to do with that.
Cue this SO thread
Nope, this is literally to do with the package version - once I changed it to 0.1.0 everything worked fine.
Figures in example code.
I was getting a strange error about things in the doc folder being too large, I can’t find it now (re-writing this blog post in 2019!), but it was there.
This made me go through and compress all my PNG images in the pkgdown docs folder. I worked really hard on trying to fix this. What this the solution to the problem?
No.
The answer? Don’t have too many figures in your examples. Use \dontrun{} like so:
#' @examples
#' \dontrun{
#' library(ggplot)
#' # example plotting code here
#' }
README figures
I decided to move the rmd figures inside the man/ folder by setting the fig.path option in a code chunk of the README.Rmd:
---
output: github_document
---
<!-- README.md is generated from README.Rmd. Please edit that file -->
```{r, echo = FALSE}`r''
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
fig.path = "man/figures/README-"
)
```
Which I copied off of what I had seen in the ggplot2 README. That’s a nice thing about github - want to know some kind of best practice? Check out what the rstudio tidyverse team does.
(Edit: this option is now part of usethis::use_readme_rmd())
It’s on CRAN - what next?
- Add a cran status badge with
usethis::use_cran_badge(), and copy and paste the text provided. - Add a cran downloads badge by going to https://cranlogs.r-pkg.org/ and entering in your pkg name.
Some reflections
In general, I have held off from submitting to CRAN because I was scared of getting something wrong. I wrote my first R package in 2013, thanks largely to Hilary Parker’s amazing blog post and then following through with Hadley’s R Packages book. But I have held off on putting things on CRAN for a long time.
In some ways, this has made things good, for example, visdat changed name 3 times (footprintr -> vizdat -> visdat), and naniar actually changed name 4 times (ggmissing -> naniar -> narnia -> naniar). Naming things is hard.
I’ve also spent a large amount of time making sure that the naming of my functions has been good, and made sense. This meant changing names from
summary_missing_variables to miss_var_summary, and then establishing a naming scheme where the missing summaries and friends start with miss_ - this makes it easier for them to be tabbed through. Similarly, there is gg_miss_var, which was initially gg_missing_variables - which I decided was too long. Iteration here took time.
But, I think that I’ll back myself in the future more now. Having github there as a way to test out ideas, and rapidly change things has been really nice, and in some ways has saved me time.
But it leaves me wondering - maybe had I put these packages out onto CRAN sooner then maybe I would have gotten more feedback from a wider audience?