[Rd] Routine and Deep testing with R CMD check

[Jeff Ryan]

A combination of RUnit from CRAN and .Rbuildignore provide a workable
solution for the 'xts' package I work on, though this obviously
removes the tests from the distributed code.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RUnit/index.html

--and--

http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=developers:runit

Jeff

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Kevin R. Coombes
<krcoombes at mdacc.tmc.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently provoked some discussion over on the BioConductor developer list
> about testing and R CMD check. In brief, the salient points that arose from
> the discussion are:
>
> [1] Because of the need for a nightly build of BioConductor, the tests (in
> the ./tests directory) of a package that run routinely as part of "R CMD
> check" must complete in five minutes.
> [2] Nontrivial regression testing of complex algorithms on real data can
> easily take longer than five minutes.
> [3] Maintaining and improving code that works on various kinds of "omics"
> data is greatly facilitated by the inclusion of nontrivial regression tests.
>
> Of course, points [1] and [3] are incompatible in the current setup. Both
> could, however, be accommodated by changing the way "R CMD check" runs test
> scripts. There are at least two ways this could be accomplished.
>
> One possibility would be to define a separate directory as part of the
> package structure to store the more complex, longer, "deep" tests. That is,
> one might have
>        package/R
>        package/man
>        package/tests
>        package/deeptests  [or some better name]
> Then the default for "R CMD check" would be to run all the .R scripts in
> tests but none of the .R scripts in deep tests. However, one would also have
> to add an option, perhaps something like
>        R CMD check --run-deeptests [package]
> to run the more elaborate test scripts.
>
> The second possibility would be to keep all the tests in the same (existing
> ./tests) directory but include a standard file in that directory to indicate
> which scripts are more complex.  This would be a little trickier to design,
> since it would be nice to keep the existing behavior for someone who ignores
> the new structure. One, could however, allow for something like
>
> ----------------------------
> ## CONTROLTESTS
>
> complex: test1.R, test3.R
> simple:  test2.R, test4.R
> -----------------------------
>
> The default (in the absence of A CONTROLTESTS file or for scripts in the
> directory that are not listed in the file) is to assume "simple", which
> would then get the existing behavior without changes to existing packages.
>
> How hard would it be to implement one of these approaches for R CMD check?
>
>  -- Kevin
>
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>



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