On 25/04/2021 11:35 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 25 April 2021 at 11:14, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| What I haven't tried to do is check any of them if *none* of the
| suggested packages is available. Packages should still build and check
| without ERRORs in this case, though I'd expect NOTEs and/or WARNINGs.
|
| This is an old issue: what packages should be present during CRAN
| checks? Currently CRAN tries to check with everything present; perhaps
| it should also try to check with the minimal set.
I last wrote about that four years ago under the title "Suggests != Depends"
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/03/22#suggests_is_not_depends
Of course, nothing changed.
So when helping a R Core member last weekend by checking his package against
just over 1000 reverse dependencies, I again had to manually wade through
dozens of false errors of packages failing tests when packages they did NOT
declare a dependency on were used unconditionally. That is still a very clear
error to me, but I no longer expect these windmills will ever stop turning.
I agree it's an error. Back when we had one of those discussions it
seemed too resource-intensive to do both kinds of tests, and it's much
easier to do the "install everything" tests if you are always working
with a fixed library.
Nowadays I think it's easier to run the tests on a VM that has exactly
the packages you specify, so people have less excuse not to do that on
their own. I have a Github "workflow" here that does it for rgl:
https://github.com/dmurdoch/rgl/actions/workflows/R-CMD-nosoft-check.yml
BTW, I've just submitted another patch, this time for the usethis
package, which added "Suggests: testthat" and then used testthat
unconditionally. That won't help any other existing packages, but if it
is accepted it might help in the future.
Duncan
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