R package dependencies not installed from Additional_repositories (revisited) - r

Question

I am attempting to prepare a package for submission to the CRAN. In my DESCRIPTION file I include non-CRAN packages in the Depends and Suggests arguments. To tell R where to find the non-CRAN packages, I include the Additional_repositories argument; and I include an .onLoad function at the top of my program (i.e., in 'zzz.R'). I am able to build and check (--as-cran) in RStudio with zero warnings, notes or errors so long as all the Depends and Suggests packages are present. I then use devtools::build() to create a .tar.gz file locally.
To test for a successful local install, I remove the non-CRAN packages from my computer and attempt to install the .tar.gz file that I created. I then get the message:
ERROR: dependency 'smwrQW' is not available for package 'baytrends'
I've read through the
R package dependencies not installed from Additional_repositories
Include non-CRAN package in CRAN package
http://thecoatlessprofessor.com/programming/r-data-packages-in-external-data-repositories-using-the-additional_repositories-field/
How should I deal with "package 'xxx' is not available (for R version x.y.z)" warning?
Unfortunately, the above error continues. I'm confident of the url I'm using since the below install.package line works when run independently
install.packages('smwrQW',repos=c("http://owi.usgs.gov/R"),dependencies = TRUE)
The applicable bits of the DESCRIPTION and zzz.R file are below:
DESCRIPTION:
Date: 2017-03-15
Depends:
R (>= 3.2.0),
lubridate,
mgcv,
smwrQW
License: GPL-3
LazyData: TRUE
RoxygenNote: 6.0.1
Suggests:
dataRetrieval,
devtools,
fitdistrplus,
knitr,
nlme,
pander,
plyr,
rmarkdown,
smwrBase,
smwrGraphs,
smwrStats,
testthat
Additional_repositories: http://owi.usgs.gov/R
VignetteBuilder: knitr
zzz.R:
.onLoad <- function(libname = find.package("baytrends"), pkgname = "baytrends"){
repos = getOption("repos")
repos["USGS"] = "http://owi.usgs.gov/R"
options(repos = repos)
invisible(repos)
# declaration of global variables (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9439256)
if(getRversion() >= "2.15.1")
utils::globalVariables(c("begin", "methodsList"))
invisible()
}
.onAttach <- function(libname = find.package("baytrends"), pkgname = "baytrends"){
packageStartupMessage("This software program is preliminary or provisional and is subject to revision. ")
}

Answer 1

You cannot have packages from non-standard repos in Depends: or Imports:.
You can have them in Suggests:
Several packages do this; one you could look at is hurricaneexposure which uses this to make a 'too-large-for-CRAN' data package hurricanexposuredata available from a repository created via drat.
So you must move the smwrQR package to Suggests: and then test for it.
Brooke and I have a draft paper (under review) on this which we could send you if you drop us line -- it details all this more than the short answer could.