Looking for contributors to R pinyin package

Details

Background

The pinyin package was developed in R language. It can convert Chinese characters in to Latin letters, officially called pinyin, i.e. the romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. The pinyin package supports the standard full spelling with or without the four tones, or the first letter of each character. Users can convert either strings or text files, or rename multiple filenames. With the help of the pinyin package, users can do further statistics and analysis in Chinese pronunciations.

The newest version of pinyin package (version 1.1.0) was released on CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network). It worked well until some recent change, therefore I am looking for contributors to help.

The problem

From the latest 'NEWS' in R-devel, R CMD check now also applies the settings of environment variables R_CHECK_SUGGESTS_ONLY and R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY to the re-building of vignettes, which enables more thorough checking of the manual:

All packages that are needed to successfully run R CMD check on the package must be listed in one of ‘Depends’ or ‘Suggests’ or ‘Imports’.

R_CHECK_SUGGESTS_ONLY=true is part of -as-cran..

The check results for the pinyin package shows as follows:

The check details :

Version: 1.1.0

Check: re-building of vignette outputs

Result: WARN

​ Error in re-building vignettes:

​ ...

​ Error in loadVignetteBuilder(vigns$pkgdir) :

​ vignette builder ‘knitr’ not found

​ Calls: buildVignettes -> loadVignetteBuilder

​ Execution halted

These warnings must be cleared before Feb. 1 to safely retain the pinyin package on CRAN.

The task and possible solutions

Shortly speaking, the task is to fix the problem and remove these warnings before Feb. 1.

As far as I know, there are some possible solutions, which the contributors could try.

The missing packages need to be declared in the Suggests: field -- there may be others missing since vignette re-building stops at the first error. You can confirm all needed packages used are declared by using 'R CMD check --as-cran' with current R-devel.

Where alternative vignette builders are used, some packages may also need to be declared in the VignetteBuilder: field:

The ‘VignetteBuilder’ field names (in a comma-separated list) packages that provide an engine for building vignettes. These may include the current package, or ones listed in ‘Depends’, ‘Suggests’ or ‘Imports’.

The utils package is always implicitly appended. See Non-Sweave vignettes for details. Note that if, for example, the vignette ‘engine’ is ‘knitr::rmarkdown’ this field needs to declare both knitr and rmarkdown.

This includes any additional packages needed by the vignette builders (e.g. formatR, webshot).

As a further check, try setting environment variable R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY=true (which is not part of --as-cran). This will identify suggested packages which are not used conditionally or need to be included in the VignetteBuilder field.

Components

The vignette of the pinyin pakcage will be affected once the task will be completed.

Deadline

Feb. 1, 2018

Communication

The contributor can get in touch with me on the Github Repo:

https://github.com/pzhaonet/pinyin

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