[Rd] R 3.5.0 fails its regression test suite on Linux/x86_64

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Peter,

I think we are on the same page, but there is little I can do for you here.
Ultimately you are asking R Core to do you a favor. More below.

On 23 April 2018 at 18:28, Peter Simons wrote:
| Hi Dirk,
| 
|  > I have been doing for R for about 20 years (if you count the time I
|  > assisted Doug Bates when he was still the maintainer) (and longer for
|  > Debian), and you seem to follow the same model we set up years ago of
|  > splitting the content of r-recommended (itself a virtual package) off
|  > r-base-core.
|  >
|  > You simply need to do this in stages.
| 
| I have packaged free software for 20+ years for many different distributions,
| and, in fact, I'm doing that professionally these days as an employee of one of
| the largest commercial Linux distributors. So please trust my expertise when I
| tell you that this is not what I want.
| 
| What I want is
| 
|   ./configure --without-recommended-packages && make && make check
| 
| to succeed without error, and I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.

Sure. You "merely" have to get R Core to implement it for you.  Given that it
does not help them (they just build 'with recommended') and is not strictly
needed (it will pass in a second pass once you used the first pass to build
the recommended packages) it is a little hard to see how this 'nice to have'
item may bubble higher on anybody's priorities.  But the general rules is
that if and when well-written patches are submitted on topics where there is
agreement that a fix may help, then they are considered. So *you* could work
on this.
 
| I have reported these kind of errors before in past, and back then a friendly R
| developer simply took a moment to disable the offending tests when the build
| was configured with this particular flag and that solved the problem. I would
| hope that this is the outcome we can achieve this time, too.

R Core disabled tests in base R for you?  Hm. Are you sure?  Or are you by
chance confusing R Core with a random package maintainer (like myself) who
may have disabled a test?
 
| If no-one wants to make those changes for whatever reason, then that's fine and
| I'll just disable the test suite in NixOS to make the build succeed. I feel like
| that would be a sub-optimal solution, though.

You could comment it out now, and re-enable it once your package stack is
refilled.  Or you could make it 'make -k check' for now.

It's really under your control as it your build environment.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org