CRAN notes that files cannot be checked without ‘pandoc’ being installed - r

Question

In doing final checks on a CRAN package submission, this NOTE comes up:
* checking top-level files ... NOTE
Files ‘README.md’ or ‘NEWS.md’ cannot be checked without ‘pandoc’ being installed.
However, pandoc is definitely installed as I use it regularly, and this package makes frequent use of it in documentation using pkgdown.
> rmarkdown::pandoc_available()
[1] TRUE
> rmarkdown::pandoc_version()
[1] ‘1.19.2.1’
I want to avoid installing pandoc from source because the latest version of pandoc supercedes the version installed with other R packages and causes weird output.
There is a similar question from a few years back but the solutions there are to either:
Install pandoc from source or via the installr package, whereas I already have pandoc installed; and,
Place the two files into .Rbuildignore, however both should be accepted with CRAN submissions now.
This note only comes up when checked using devtools::release() and when using devtools::check(check_version = TRUE), which otherwise passes with no warnings or notes.
The RStudio install of Pandoc:
Sys.getenv('RSTUDIO_PANDOC')
[1] "/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/pandoc"
Which I had previously exported to my ~/.bash_profile:
export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/Rstudio.app/Contents/MacOS/pandoc"
Any ideas?
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS High Sierra 10.13.2
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib
locale:
[1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] cancensus_0.1.6
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.14 rstudioapi_0.7 knitr_1.17 bindr_0.1
[5] xml2_1.1.1 magrittr_1.5 roxygen2_6.0.1 devtools_1.13.4
[9] R6_2.2.2 rlang_0.1.6 httr_1.3.1 stringr_1.2.0
[13] dplyr_0.7.4 tools_3.4.3 hunspell_2.9 git2r_0.20.0
[17] withr_2.1.1 htmltools_0.3.6 rversions_1.0.3 commonmark_1.4
[21] rprojroot_1.2 yaml_2.1.14 digest_0.6.13 assertthat_0.2.0
[25] tibble_1.3.4 crayon_1.3.4 bindrcpp_0.2 curl_3.1
[29] evaluate_0.10.1 memoise_1.1.0 glue_1.2.0 rmarkdown_1.8
[33] stringi_1.1.5 compiler_3.4.3 backports_1.1.0 desc_1.1.1
[37] jsonlite_1.5 pkgconfig_2.0.1

Answer 1

This happens because devtools::release calls devtools::check with check_version = TRUE.
You can also run devtools::check(check_version = TRUE) to trigger the same note.
I think for this part you would need pandoc on your PATH.
(indeed, after adding the existing ...\RStudio\bin\pandoc to my PATH the note is gone)

Answer 2

This question appears to be a duplicate.
Currently no accepted solution at the above linked Q. However, #hrbrmster's suggested solution in that thread: adding the README.md and NEWS.md to the .Rbuildignore remove the NOTES for me.
Current .RBuildignore contents
^pkg_name_here\.Rproj$
^\.Rproj\.user$
^cran-comments\.md$
^CODE_OF_CONDUCT\.md$
^README\.md$
^NEWS\.md$