Add an option for R CMD install to work on a writable copy of the source files about rules_r HOT 2 CLOSED

For XML, I can build just fine with 3.98-1.9 and 3.98-1.11.
For Rgraphviz version 2.22.0, the bundled graphviz software should not have contained src/graphviz/graphviz_version.h. If you delete that file, or add it in the exclude argument of the srcs glob in your BUILD file, you will be able to build the package. I will suggest modifying the auto generated BUILD file, and maybe submit a PR to the Rgraphviz package to delete the checked in file for a longer term fix.

In general, it is not a good practice to modify source files during build. In the past, I have asked packages to stop doing this. In the ~300 R packages we use at GRAIL, the only packages that needed an override to the auto generated BUILD files were GLAD (needed a config_override to say that the package directory is not called GLAD) and Rsamtools (needed post_install_files).

Creating temporary files within the source tree is fine; bazel will not complain for that.

A quick workaround when you don't want to find a proper fix for a package would be to use --spawn_strategy=standalone, but I do not want to encourage people writing configure scripts that modify source files.

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Thank you for this thorough answer! I wasn't happy with that either but thought about it out of necessity. You obviously have thought about it much more than I did, but for what it's worth here was my reasoning:

• Concerning the XML package, I built it with a custom version of libxml2 to not have to depend on the system libxml2. This required me to provide some custom R/supports.R. I was misled by https://github.com/omegahat/XML at HEAD and thought that R/supports.R was distributed with the package, and that I would have to overwrite it. Actually, it is not distributed with the current version on CRAN, so my custom R/supports.R would not have to overwrite anything and copy_srcs proved to be useless here.
• Concerning flowWorkspace, thank you for the workaround, I looked at the wrong place for the error.

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