Vignettes that require locally stored data

[nick]

I think this prior thread is relevant to your question:

Precompiling vignette with devtools

I'm working on a package that allows importing the IPUMS data into R and I want to include vignettes that are based on our tutorials for other statistical packages. The one issue is that these tutorials use datasets that are too large to fit on CRAN. It seems like it is possible to submit pre-compiled vignettes to CRAN (here's how to do with R.rsp). This way I can have the data in a separate github package, but won't have to include the github package in the Suggests field. This avoids a R CMD Check note about a non-CRAN package dependency, which wouldn't really be the end of the world, but I'd still like to avoid. Since I've only used devtools to build my vignettes in the past, I'm blissf…

Basically, it looks like the "best" option is a hybrid of your two options, where you use an environmental variable to determine whether eval is TRUE or FALSE.