The canonical form [1] of an R package Makefile includes the
following:
- The first stanza includes R_PKGNAME, R_PKGVER, PKGREVISION (as
needed), and CATEGORIES.
- HOMEPAGE is not present but defined in math/R/Makefile.extension to
refer to the CRAN web page describing the package. Other relevant
web pages are often linked from there via the URL field.
This updates all current R packages to this form, which will make
regular updates _much_ easier, especially using pkgtools/R2pkg.
[1] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2019/08/02/msg021711.html
Each R package should include ../../math/R/Makefile.extension, which also
defines MASTER_SITES. Consequently, it is redundant for the individual
packages to do the same. Package-specific definitions also prevent
redefining MASTER_SITES in a single common place.
assertthat is an extension to stopifnot() that makes it easy to
declare the pre and post conditions that you code should satisfy,
while also producing friendly error messages so that your users know
what they've done wrong.