[general] Should {nanonext} be made a 'Suggests' dependency?

[MilesMcBain]

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Description

I noticed after failure to install dev {targets} that {nanonext} depends on libnng which is only available for Ubuntu 20.04 and later.

An environment I use is Ubuntu 18.04, which is not technically end of life until the end of this month. I do note that Ubuntu 18.04 is supported out to 2028 with a pro subscription.

I will be doing my best to get our environment upgraded promptly, but I still think if it's a trivial change it might be worth making {nanonext} a suggested dependency to avoid catching people off guard.

[wlandau]

Moved to Suggests: in 451c30a.

I did a lot of work last week to reduce the overhead processing lots of targets, and part of that included replacing the slow proc.time() with the much faster nanonext::mclock() where possible. But as a Suggests: package, it turned out to be more complicated than I thought because a check of requireNamespace("nanonext") locally caused forked clustermq/future processes to crash. Today I did some more digging and found that find.package() is a nice alternative which does not cause these issues.

nanonext is required by mirai, which is required by crew. After the next round of package releases in a week or 2, crew will supersede clustermq and future as the recommended way to run pipelines with parallel computing: https://books.ropensci.org/targets/crew.html

[MilesMcBain]

Great! Thanks for your hard work and responsiveness, as always Will.

I don't use any of this HPC stuff at the moment, but it's exciting to see {targets} gaining these superpowers.

[shikokuchuo]

@MilesMcBain I've just been made aware of this by @wlandau. Can you help me understand the issue you have installing {nanonext} on Ubuntu 18.04? The system library is only used if present and meets the minimum version requirement (> 1.5). Otherwise the bundled source will be automatically built, and all that requires is cmake. It is not a heavy dependency at all - the entire package is only ~800k. There is a much more substantive use that would benefit {targets} I have been working with @wlandau on in this thread #1139.

[MilesMcBain]

@shikokuchuo

Well I don’t have the problem any longer since we upgraded Ubuntu as I noted we would in the initial issue.

I can’t remember the error clearly but dev targets could not be successfully installed, and failed with some kind of compilation error, which ended up being due to the system missing libnng. Again as I noted in the original issue.

Keep in mind the timing of this was shortly after nanonext was added as a dependency to {targets} so I am not sure if the conditional vendoring of code you describe was in play then?

[shikokuchuo]

If I understand correctly then, this is not a case of you being forced to use a system library from your package manager (which does not exist), but just that the compilation failed at the time.

If so then I am fairly certain that this was caused by this bug shikokuchuo/nanonext#16, which was introduced by 0.8.3, released just a few days before you reported your initial problem, and now fixed in 0.10.1.

I don't see any inherent problem in installing on old Ubuntu versions. Thanks for your help in understanding this.

[MilesMcBain]

It's possible it was caused by shikokuchuo/nanonext#16, but the error text in that report does not look familiar.

As I recall the error was much more like the standard stuff you get when you're missing things on linux, I have a feeling it was a missing header file.

[shikokuchuo]

Sure, we don't know what the exact code was that caused the initial failure. But bigger picture, there is no problem per se with 'libnng' not being available in your package manager, given that it would build from the bundled source as I have described.