@eddelbuettel
thank you for the pull request. I follow RcppArmadillo and I am aware of the latest RcppArmadillo issues
Last week I submitted updated versions to CRAN for all (my) 6 R packages (ClusterR, elmNNRcpp, fastGLCM, KernelKnn, VMDecomp, SuperpixelImageSegmentation) mentioned in #484 and #486 Github issues.
Thank you for your efforts (especially for RcppArmadillo that I use mostly in my R packages)

Sorry, I must have missed than against the current GitHub sources. Thank you so much for taking care of all these updates so quickly, it is really appreciated!

I just got to your ClusterR and once again: Thank you! Version 1.3.4 already takes care of things! I am little behind given RcppArmadillo's over 1200 reverse dependencies so this is really appreciated!

(The DESCRIPTION file for ClusterR says you need to install libarmadillo-dev (etc), that is generally incorrect. Notice that eg on Linux we link ClusterR as

g++ -Wl,-S -shared -L/usr/lib/R/lib -Wl,-z,relro -o ClusterR.so RcppExports.o export_inst_folder_headers.o init.o -llapack -lblas -lgfortran -lm -lquadmath -fopenmp -L/usr/lib/R/lib -lR

so no libarmadillo here: all it needs comes from R (for example the LAPACK/BLAS bits) and RcppArmadillo (the headers).) I

@eddelbuettel

I'm sorry for the late reply. I understand that you have to resolve many issues related to the reverse dependencies of RcppArmadillo.

I have an internal R package that picks the system requirements from the DESCRIPTION file and creates the Dockerfile, which Dockerfile then I use in a Github action to create the docker image of the package. I did this because a few of my R packages require specific software (for instance ClusterR requires libgmp3) and I'm not familiar with configuration files.

I understand that we should only include system requirements related to the installed R package. Do you think it would be an issue if I don't remove these system requirements from the DESCRIPTION file?

Oh I see -- that makes sense because you wrote your own bespoke software to parse that free-format line in DESCRIPTION. The comment I was making was more general in the sense that a few of us have belabored the fact that there is no machine parseable format to express this generally.

So for example Inaki maintains a database here in this csv file at GitHub (plus other files in that repo), and the posit folks have something similar too to support tooling they provide.

I encode these too for my r2u system providing CRAN as binaries for Ubuntu (and I should really align this with Inaki I suppose).

So I simply did not know your use case here, and it is hard to know as the field is free form :-/ So by all means keep it. Nothing really is require unless CRAN says 😉

That said, to use RcppArmadillo you should never need libarmadillo-dev unless you are doing something very non-standard (and I ran into one new package that contacted me did that too). So if you want to change that I can probably help you.

To come to the system requirements I used the following

sysreqs::sysreq_commands(DESCRIPTION_file, platform = "linux-x86_64-ubuntu-gcc", soft = TRUE) 

from the sysreqs but it only retrieved the minimal requirements. However recently the 'sysreqs` was archived in favor of rstudio/r-system-requirements

I think it's time to adjust the DESCRIPTION files because I don't know how these files are used either from CRAN or from other packages. I'll start slowly to make the adjustments and thanks for the resources (database, r2u) and the reminder for the DESCRIPTION file

I tried now the pak R package and seems to show all results even for the dependencies (just for reference)

> pak::pkg_sysreqs(pkg = 'ClusterR', dependencies = TRUE, upgrade = TRUE, sysreqs_platform = "ubuntu")
── Install scripts ────────────────────────────── Ubuntu NA ──
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install libfftw3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev make libgmp3-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg-dev pandoc libpng-dev libtiff-dev

── Packages and their system dependencies ──────────────────────────────────────────
ClusterR   – libfftw3-dev
curl       – libcurl4-openssl-dev, libssl-dev
fs         – make
gmp        – libgmp3-dev
httpuv     – make, zlib1g-dev
jpeg       – libjpeg-dev
knitr      – pandoc
OpenImageR – libfftw3-dev, libjpeg-dev, libpng-dev
openssl    – libssl-dev
png        – libpng-dev
rmarkdown  – pandoc
sass       – make
tiff       – libjpeg-dev, libtiff-dev

I would not know as I do not use pak.

When I do install.packages("ClusterR") in the r2u container no system libraries are installed, only 20 or so R packages taking all of six seconds (!!) and the package loads fine.

When I run ldd /usr/lib/R/site-library/ClusterR/libs/ClusterR.so I see no reference to libfftw3 there. Maybe there is a difference between mandatory and optional dependencies (ie "Suggests:" in R terms) here...

I'll proceed and remove the SystemRequirements as you suggested and thanks again for your comment on this.

Please let me repeat my initial comment:

The DESCRIPTION file for ClusterR says you need to install libarmadillo-dev (etc), that is generally incorrect.

I made a very specific comment. You have not replied at all to that comment. I have no general problem with using SystemRequirement -- the field is there for a reason -- but I felt it would help if I pointed out to you you should not need this as libarmadillo-dev is not usually required to use RcppArmadillo. That was, and is all.