[Rd] Should demo files be run as part of R CMD check?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, hadley wickham wrote:
>
>> I was a bit suprised to note that demo files are not run as part of R
>> CMD check.  This seems out of keeping with the philosophy of running
>> all code contained in the package (in the source, in examples etc).
>>
>> Should demo files be checked as part of R CMD check?
>>
>
>
> The rationale may be that a demo is entitled to assume it is being run
> interactively.  Checking demo(tkdensity), for example, would be
> unproductive.

Also, it is easy for a package author to arrange to check the demos by a 
test in the package's tests directory.

The non-interactive demos in the R tarball are checked via 'make 
check-devel'.  Had we been starting for now, we would use the 'tests' 
mechanism, but on Unix-alikes the standard packages are installed and 
checked in different ways from contributed ones.

-- 
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