Remove System Requirements: GNU make by default?

[statasaurus]

I used rstantools to add stan to an existing package. And now I am putting it into cran, I have got feedback from CRAN that it shouldn't really be used as rstan can deal with the more recent standards. So should this be removed?

rstantools/inst/include/sys/DESCRIPTION

Line 16 in e5506cb

SystemRequirements: GNU make

[andrjohns]

We add GNU make as a requirement since the makefiles use shell calls for setting compiler flags (in the same way as the RcppParallel package), which isn't standard POSIX-make syntax and causes an R CMD check error.

Would you be able to share what the exact feedback from CRAN was? We haven't heard about it from any of our other packages, so would be good to know if there's an upcoming change/requirement that we'll need to accommodate

[statasaurus]

Sure, Yeah I got this message from Uwe

Well, rstan can deal with all more recent standards these days, so I
believe you could also use C++ standards newer than 11? Note that 11
support will be dropped by some modern compilers. So dropping that
requirement would really be welcome.

[andrjohns]

Ah yes that's not referring to GNU make. Do you have SystemRequirements: C++11 or similar in your DESCRIPTION file?

[statasaurus]

Sorry, I was only grabbing part of the email chain the first was this

Thanks, we see:

GNU make is a SystemRequirements.

Is this really required?

[andrjohns]

Got it! In that case you can just provide my comment above as a response from the rstan devs for why we add GNU make (or link to this github issue)

[statasaurus]

Thank you for your quick response 😄