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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 23/04/2018 12:28 PM, 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.

So you're getting paid to do what you do, but you want the volunteers in 
R Core to do some work for you for free.  I *do* think that's an 
unreasonable expectation.

> 
> 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.

Perhaps back then you were also a volunteer.

> 
> 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.

I agree.  You should spend some time working out a better one.

Duncan Murdoch