[Rd] wishlist: better error message in R CMD check

[Liaw, Andy]

Gabor,

I guess is that you did not try to run R CMD INSTALL before R CMD check.  R
CMD check will try to install the package first (in pkg.Rcheck), and only if
that's successful would checks be done.

The installation process will concatenate all R files in R/ to a single file
and essentially source() that in upon package loading.  That's where you
would see the syntax error.  I believe the recommended way is to install the
package and play with that a bit first, before doing R CMD check.  You'd
find some problems are much easier to find that way (e.g., errors in
NAMESPACE).

Cheers,
Andy

> From: Gabor Grothendieck
> 
> I was running R CMD check on Windows XP 2.0.1beta and 
> got this:
> 
> Error in parse(file, n, text, prompt) : syntax error on 602
> 
> After a lot of aggravation I finally discovered that if I did
> this:
> 
> copy *.R allofthem.R
> 
> and checked line 602 in allofthem.R that I could find the error.
> I noticed that there are repeated references in the help archives
> to this sort of error and how hard it is to locate it.  It 
> certainly would be nice to tell the user which file the error
> is in and to point to the original files, not some intermediate
> file or if one must do it in terms of intermediate files to keep
> the file around and tell the user which and where it is.
> 
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