[Rd] Parallel R CMD check?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 17/02/2012 06:50, Martin Morgan wrote:
> Running R CMD check on a package can take quite a lot of time. Checks
> seem like they could be run in parallel (separate processes for, e.g.,
> codoc, examples, tests, ...). Is there a way to do this? My current
> usage is typically
>
> R CMD build <pkg>
> R CMD check pkg_x.y.z.tar.gz
>
> Thanks for any hints,

Not at present.  It would need a lot of re-organization of the check.R 
code to collect output and present it in a reasonable order.  I rather 
doubt is worth the effort: most of us with machines with large numbers 
of cores are not just checking one package at a time, and for many 
packages with long check times it is one aspect of the check which takes 
most of the time.

We have considered running separate tests and vignette R code in 
parallel: it was one of the motivations of having package 'parallel'. 
But even then people complained when we batched up all the test output 
and only reported it when all the tests had been run.

>
> Martin


-- 
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)
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