Submit to CRAN or r-universe ?

[Artur-man]

Dear all,

Thanks for making this great tool available to R users.

Would it be possible to get SimpleITK available in a repo (CRAN, r-universe) so folks can install binary versions without the lengthy build ? This may allow people to more easily use SimpleITK as a dependancy ...

I am not sure how hard it can be given the current build requires cmake.

Best,
Artür

Note: We will soon test the build on Windows.

[Artur-man]

Here is more information on how to submit to r-universe.
https://ropensci.org/blog/2021/06/22/setup-runiverse/

Could be a good alternative since the current installer does not follow a common R package structure, hence may not accepted to CRAN or BioC.

[richardbeare]

I won't get a chance to look into this until the new year, unfortunately. You are right that it won't get accepted onto CRAN - not only does it not follow standard package structure due to the support for multiple binding languages, but every component of the autogenerated code, documentation etc , is significantly larger than CRAN accepts for packages. We did attempt nuroconductor at one point without success. Hopefully runiverse will give as alternative.

[Artur-man]

or perhaps also releases with R binaries ? sorry if this was already discussed
https://github.com/SimpleITK/SimpleITK/releases/tag/v2.5.2

[Artur-man]

Another alternative that I have just stumbled on is this ITK builder:
https://github.com/ANTsX/ITKR

It has a similar configuration (includes win too) and has R package styling.

[zivy]

The ITKR repository pointed to uses RCpp to wrap the C++ code. This is appropriate when the only target language is R. SimpleITK uses SWIG to consistently wrap multiple target languages (Python, R, C#, java). It does not fit the R package styling, but is useful while supporting all the other languages.