[Rd] R CMD check issue with R 3.0.2

[Terry Therneau]

On 10/28/2013 06:00 AM, r-devel-request at r-project.org wrote:
> On 13-10-26 9:49 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>> >  On Oct 25, 2013, at 12:12 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
>> >
>>> >>  This has been asked soooo many times that I think it may be a good
>>> >>  idea for R CMD check to just stop when the user passes a directory
>>> >>  instead of a tar ball to it, or automatically run R CMD build before
>>> >>  moving on. In my opinion, sometimes an FAQ and a bug are not entirely
>>> >>  different.
>>> >>
>> >
>> >  +1 -- and I'd do the same for R CMD INSTALL. If someone insists, there could be --force or something like that for those that really want to work on directories despite all the issues with that, but IMHO the default should be for both INSTALL and check to bail out if not presented with a file -- it would save a lot of people a lot of time spent in chasing ghost issues.
> That seems like a reasonable suggestion.  I wouldn't want to lose the
> ability to install or check a directory; for development of packages
> like rgl which have a lot of compiled code, installing from a tarball
> takes a lot longer than installing when all of the code has already been
> compiled.

I use R CMD check on directories often.  The survival and coxme pacakges have large test 
suites, and before things are packaged up for R forge there are may be multiple iterations 
to get past all of them.  (Add one new idea, break something old).  Creating the tarball 
is slow due to vignettes.
   Thus I would hate to see it outlawed. Of course I know enough to ignore many of the 
warnings during this testing stage, I do use the tarball for my final run, and I 
understand the noise level that this option incurs on R-devel.

Terry T.