[Rd] R CMD check: Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD") cannot contain full pathname (contrary to docs)

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Bump, in case it was missed.  This is also the case with R Under
development (unstable) (2012-05-25 r59443).  /Henrik

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> in help("R_GSCMD") it says "R_GSCMD: Optional. The path to
> Ghostscript, used by dev2bitmap, bitmap and embedFonts. Consulted when
> those functions are invoked.".  However, if 'R_GSCMD' contains a full
> pathname to the Ghostscript executable (as above "path" indicates),
> e.g.
>
>> Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD")
> [1] "C:\\Program Files\\gs\\gs8.71\\bin\\gswin32c.exe"
>
> then 'R CMD check' will report
>
> * checking sizes of PDF files under 'inst/doc' ... NOTE
> Unable to find GhostScript executable to run checks on size reduction
>
> Setting 'R_GSCMD' to "gswin32c.exe" and asserting that it is the PATH
> (this is on Windows), it works.
>
>
> TROUBLESHOOTING:
> In the local function check_doc_size() of tools:::.check_packages()
> [cf. http://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/tools/R/check.R],
> the Ghostscript executable is retrieved as:
>
>  gs_cmd <- find_gs_cmd(Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD", ""))
>
> and if nzchar(gs_cmd) is FALSE, then the 'R CMD check' NOTE appears.
> Inspecting tools:::find_gs_cmd, this corresponds to
>
>  gs_cmd <- Sys.which(Sys.getenv("R_GSCMD", ""))
>
> iff 'R_GSCMD' is set.  In other words, tools:::find_gs_cmd() assumes a
> basename not a full pathname.
>
>
> SUGGESTIONS:
> Update tools:::find_gs_cmd() to test for file existence before turning
> to Sys.which(), e.g.
>
> find_gs_cmd <- function (gs_cmd)
> {
>    if (!nzchar(gs_cmd)) {
>        if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") {
>            gs_cmd <- Sys.which("gswin64c")
>            if (!nzchar(gs_cmd))
>                gs_cmd <- Sys.which("gswin32c")
>            gs_cmd
>        }
>        else Sys.which("gs")
>    } else {
>      if (file.exists(gs_cmd) && !file.info(gs_cmd)$isdir)
>        gs_cmd
>      else
>        Sys.which(gs_cmd)
>   }
> }
>
>
> /Henrik
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.15.0 Patched (2012-04-08 r58935)
> Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>
> locale:
> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] R.methodsS3_1.4.0 tools_2.15.0