[jira] [Created] (ARROW-12017) [R] [Documentation] Make proper developing arrow docs

["Jonathan Keane (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Jonathan Keane created ARROW-12017:
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             Summary: [R] [Documentation] Make proper developing arrow docs
                 Key: ARROW-12017
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-12017
             Project: Apache Arrow
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: Documentation, R
            Reporter: Jonathan Keane
            Assignee: Jonathan Keane


Right now we have discussions of installation in two places: the readme and a vignette that is (almost exclusively) focused on Linux. Both of these cover installation as a user and installation as a developer.

We want to change this to have a better split so that we can focus the topics to what people actually need:

* The readme should have user-facing how-to-install from CRAN + how to get nightlies and a link to a developer docs vignette if one wants to build from source / develop
* The developer docs vignette should include details about compilation, debugging, etc.

The developer docs should:
[ ] Note how to install the R dependencies for the package. The audience here is not necessarily R developers, so we should be super explicit and not assume things like "I have set a CRAN mirror, of course"
[ ] Recommend building + installing libarrow to the same / a similar non-system directory as the python docs do. (Note: this might take some testing + work to ensure that when R builds it does not attempt to link against existing system installs — I've had this happen in the past and it can be incredibly confusing when it does)
[ ] Include debugging instructions for "Can't load this symbol" "Can't find this function" type errors (either the library isn't linking at runtime at all, or it's linking to a stale libarrow and libarrow needs to be rebuilt.




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