bones is on CRAN: two things the review caught

R
Shiny
packages

bones is on CRAN. The review caught a package name and a demo that left plot settings behind, and taught me to search beyond the named line.

Author

Tanmay Chanda

Published

26 October 2026

bones 0.1.1 is on CRAN. It was published on 16 October. It is my second package on CRAN, after rewind.

install.packages("bones")

bones gives Shiny outputs loading placeholders in the shape of their content. My first post explains the idea. This one is about getting it through review.

I submitted 0.1.0 on 25 September. The automatic pre-tests on Windows and Debian passed with one NOTE: “New submission”. Every first submission gets that note.

On 6 October, a reviewer sent two requests and ended with “Please fix and resubmit.”

A package name keeps its case

CRAN asks for the names of packages, software and APIs in the Title and Description fields of DESCRIPTION to be in single quotes. I had written 'Shiny'. The package is called shiny. Package names are case sensitive.

The title is now:

Content-Shaped Loading Placeholders for 'shiny' Outputs

Title Case does not apply inside those quotes. The name must keep the case of the package it names.

R CMD check --as-cran passed with 'Shiny' and gave no note about it. The human reviewer caught it. A clean check does not mean that every name in the prose is right.

There was a second place to fix. Roxygen copies the Title and Description into the package help page, man/bones-package.Rd, through the "_PACKAGE" sentinel. Changing DESCRIPTION alone leaves the old text in the help page and the PDF manual. I had to run roxygen again.

This shell command helps with the name check:

grep -oE "'[^']+'" DESCRIPTION | sort -u

It lists every quoted name. Compare each one with the real name, including its case. Then rebuild the help files that copy those fields.

Give the settings back, also under inst/

The other request was to restore changes to par(), options() and the working directory in examples, vignettes and demos. The reviewer added “in your inst folder”.

bones has a demo app under inst/examples/demo/. Users can run it with:

shiny::runApp(system.file("examples/demo", package = "bones"))

Its plots changed par() inside renderPlot() and never put the settings back. R CMD check did not catch this either. The reviewer read inst/ by hand.

The fix saves the old settings and restores them when the function exits:

old_par <- par(mar = c(3, 3, 1, 1), mgp = c(2, 0.6, 0), las = 1)
on.exit(par(old_par), add = TRUE)

on.exit() works inside a renderPlot() expression because Shiny makes that expression the body of a function. The cleanup belongs to that function, and also runs if it exits with an error.

A demo ships with the package too. I need to treat its changes to the user’s settings with the same care as changes in R/.

Search beyond the line in the reply

The reviewer gave me an example, not a full list. Before resubmitting, I searched the whole package for the same kind of change:

grep -rnE "options\(|par\(|setwd\(|Sys\.setenv\(" R man inst vignettes demo

The demo was the only place. But fixing only the named line would have left me guessing about the rest. That is my first lesson from this release: turn a review comment into a search for the pattern.

I fixed both requests and resubmitted as 0.1.1 on 6 October. A resubmission needs a higher version. The covering comment starts with a “Resubmission” section that lists each change.

Then it waited in CRAN’s folder for new packages, called “newbies”. I could watch the queue at CRAN incoming and on cransays.

On 16 October, the reply was “Thanks, on its way to CRAN.” bones 0.1.1 was published that day.

The release that tags itself

My second lesson is to let the GitHub release follow CRAN. A merge is too early. CRAN can still send that version back. GitHub could then show “Latest” beside a version CRAN never published. That nearly happened with 0.1.0.

A workflow in .github/workflows/release.yaml, first written for rewind, runs once a day. It reads the bones version in the CRAN index. If that version has no git tag, it downloads the CRAN tarball.

It finds the oldest commit on main with that version in DESCRIPTION whose files match the tarball. It skips DESCRIPTION, MD5 and build/, which R CMD build and CRAN change. It tags that commit and makes a GitHub release, using that version’s section of NEWS.md as the notes.

On 17 October, it tagged v0.1.1 at the commit sent to CRAN. Main had already moved on. Nobody had to remember to tag it.

Before a package reaches CRAN, the daily run stops with a notice instead of an error. It does not send an email every day.

What comes next

These changes are in the development version for 0.2.0. They are not on CRAN yet:

  • An error panel when an output fails, in place of Shiny’s red error text.
  • Learned shapes. After a load, the browser stores the content’s shape, using numbers only, with no text. The next visit shows a skeleton in that shape.
  • Clear errors for a misspelt shape. type = "bars" says Did you mean "bar"?.

Try it