[Rd] package development

[Mathieu Ribatet]

Dear Terry,

One way to locate which file is wrong - surely not the most brillant 
way! You could do an R script that sources each of your .R files within 
a "for (file in file.names)" loop.
When R will stop, it will indicate which file has a wrong syntax and 
more info.

Cheers,
Mathieu

Terry Therneau a écrit :
>   I'm making the move of the survival package from my own environment to,
> and have stumbled into a vacuum.   The R Extensions manual has really nice
> instructions about how to lay out the directories, order the files, and
> run tests for DISTRIBUTION of a product, but I can't find anything on how
> to set up a reasonable DEVELOPMENT environment.
>    In my local world, I had the .c and .s files in a common directory, with
> a Makefile that I had created, and the test suite in a subdirectory.  Debugging
> and development was quite nice.
> 	make
> 	cd test
> 	R
> 	attach("..")
> 		try something and perhaps it fails
> 	q()
> 	cd ..
> Fix and repeat. The Makefile took some time to create, but paid for itself a
> hundred times over. 
>
>   So, I've now rearranged everything into standard R order.  Then I did the
> only thing I could find
> 	R CMD INSTALL ~/myRlib  survival  
> where "survival" is said directory.   This turns out to be not useful at all.
> The survival package is large, and I rather suspected that I would goof 
> something up, and I did, resulting in the following message
>
> 	Error in parse(n = -1, file = file) : unexpected end of input at
>         14450: }
>         14451: 
>
> It is not exactly obvious which of the 132 files in my R/ directory is the 
> culprit here.
>
>    In general:
> 1. The library is large, and recompiling/reparsing everything is very far from
> instantaneous.  It is not the edit/load cycle I desire.
>
> 2. I take testing seriously: the test suite takes on the order of 15 minutes to
> run on a fast machine.  I most certainly don't want to run it in the mid cycle.
>
>    Someone must have tackled this.  I'm hoping that there is some documentation
> that I have managed to overlook which discussess a good setup for this middle
> ground between concieving of a library and packaging it for delivery; the
> "build, test, make sure it acually works" part of development.
>
> 	Terry Therneau
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>   

-- 
Institute of Mathematics
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
STAT-IMA-FSB-EPFL, Station 8
CH-1015 Lausanne   Switzerland
http://stat.epfl.ch/
Tel: + 41 (0)21 693 7907