On 05/05/2021 5:13 a.m., Martin Maechler wrote:
Gabriel Becker on Tue, 4 May 2021 14:40:22 -0700 writes:> Hmm, that's fair enough Ben, I stand corrected. I will say that this seems > to be a pretty "soft" recommendation, as these things go, given that it > isn't tested for by R CMD check, including with the -as-cran extensions. In > principle, it seems like it could be, similar checks are made in package > code for inappropriate external-package-symbol usage/ > Either way, though, I suppose I have a number of packages which have been > invisibly non-best-practices compliant for their entire lifetimes (or at > least, the portion of that where they had tests/vignettes...). > Best, > ~G > On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 2:22 PM Ben Bolker <bbol...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Sorry if this has been pointed out already, but some relevant text >> from >> >> https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Suggested-packages >> >> > Note that someone wanting to run the examples/tests/vignettes may not >> have a suggested package available (and it may not even be possible to >> install it for that platform). The recommendation used to be to make >> their use conditional via if(require("pkgname")): this is OK if that >> conditioning is done in examples/tests/vignettes, although using >> if(requireNamespace("pkgname")) is preferred, if possible. >> >> ... >> >> > Some people have assumed that a ‘recommended’ package in ‘Suggests’ >> can safely be used unconditionally, but this is not so. (R can be >> installed without recommended packages, and which packages are >> ‘recommended’ may change.) Thank you all (Henrik, Gabe, Dirk & Ben) ! I think it would be a good community effort and worth the time also of R core to further move into the right direction as Dirk suggested. I think we all agree it would be nice if Henrik (and anybody) could use 'make check' on R's own sources after using --without-recommended-packages Even one more piece of evidence is the tests/README file in the R sources. It has much more but simply starts with --------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is a hierarchy of check targets: make check for all builders. If this works one can be reasonably happy R is working and do `make install' (or the equivalent). make check-devel for people changing the code: this runs things like the demos and no-segfault which might be broken by code changes, and checks on the documentation (effectively R CMD check on each of the base packages). This needs recommended packages installed. make check-all runs all the checks, those in check-devel plus tests of the recommended packages. Note that for complete testing you will need a number of other ...................... ...................... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, our (R core) own intent has been that 'make check' should run w/o rec.packages but further checking not. So, yes, please, you are encouraged to send patches against the R devel trunk to fix such examples and tests.
I think it would be useful to issue some kind of warning if tests are skipped. As mentioned earlier, this is impossible in user-contributed packages, which can only return OK or ERROR from their tests.
Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
