Why is pophelper not on CRAN?

[royfrancis]

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This is a question I get asked often and I am offering an explanation here.

I've been asked a few times about why this package is not on CRAN. And the answer is simply that the package contains windows and linux executables (clumpp/distruct) which is not allowed on CRAN under submission guidelines.

Source packages may not contain any form of binary executable code.

One possibility (the easy option) would be to have a version without these executables for CRAN. Another option (more work) is to re-write/implement the CLUMPP code in R. Personally, I don't think it's too much extra effort to install from GitHub anyway.

If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to comment here.

[EngineerCoding]

Personally I think it is worth the extra effort to have a version without the executables (so purely have the plotting capabilities). I am detecting dynamically whether a library is available and if not available, download it automatically from biocLite or CRAN. Currently I have hardcoded to detect this library, as devtools does not automatically handle dependency management.

I get it might get more complex maintaining two builds, but is there a true usecase to run CLUMPP etc. directly from the R code? In my opininion, this package should be focussed on handling the output files only.

[royfrancis]

Sounds reasonable. I could create a version without executables for CRAN.