问题
I would like to hear how folks do their reverse dependency checks on Windows these days.
When using the "official", yet experimental function tools::check_packages_in_dir() as suggested by CRAN Repository Policy [1] on Windows, reverse dependencies are checked based on their sources, i.e., everything is to be compiled. This can take ages even for relatively few dependencies/suggested packages. Next to that, it is not very convenient as I hit a lot of missing packages in the process so that the tests error, I need to install the missing packages and start over again...
I used to use devtools::revdep_check which was convenient as it used the Windows binaries for checks so no time is spend for compilation and it offered a nice handling in general. However, it was decided with version 2.0 that this functionality shall not live inside devtools anymore but shall be moved to a dedicated package (revdepcheck, to be used in devtools via intermediating package use_this) which is not available on CRAN yet and which does not build in its development repository. This effectively defunct status in devtools seems to endure for over a year now (with some new activities in revdepcheck development only recently).
(Edit: I should also mention that using a version of devtools prior to removal of the reverse dependency check function seems to give arbitrary errors, so that does not seem to be an option either.)
I did not find any other approaches that seem viable. So I wonder, how to check reverse dependencies duely and efficiently on a Windows-based machine these days?
[1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61320722/package-reverse-dependency-checks-especially-on-windows