[Rd] Shy Suggestion?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Jari Oksanen wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 09:42 -0400, Roger D. Peng wrote:
>> I think this needs to fail because packages listed in 'Suggests:' may, for
>> example, be needed in the examples.  How can 'R CMD check' run the examples and
>> verify that they are executable if those packages are not available?  I suppose
>> you could put the examples in a \dontrun{}.
>>
> Yes, that's what I do, and exactly for that reason: if something is not
> necessarily needed (= 'suggestion' in this culture), it should not be
> required in tests. However, if I don't use \dontrun{} for a
> non-recommended package, the check would fail and I would get the needed
> information: so why should the check fail already when checking
> DESCRIPTION?

Because it is a `check', and it assembles all the information needed at 
the beginning.  I'd certainly prefer to know at the beginning rather than 
20 minutes into running the tests.

R CMD check is not really for end users: it is for package writers, 
repository maintainers and for people checking proposed R changes.  Those 
people want all the checks possible to be done.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595