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

[Thomas Lumley]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

> 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.

The intermediate file *is* kept around (at least for CMD check on a 
directory -- I haven't tried it on a tarball).  It is
  package.Rcheck/package/R/package

Telling the user where it is would be helpful, as you say.

 	-thomas