[Rd] Windows check problems.

[Tomas Kalibera]

For reference, this has been addressed in R-devel, R now falls back to 
copy when symlinking of the package directory silently fails.

Thanks to Duncan for his analysis and a patch that fixed this.
Tomas

On 12/11/19 5:22 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> The thread starting with this message:
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2019q4/004745.html
>
> described problems Rich Heiberger was having with package checking on 
> Windows.  It appeared that during the tests of examples, an old 
> version of the package was loaded but the new tests were being run, 
> causing lots of confusion and trouble.
>
> I reproduced the error, and I think I've found the cause.  I had his 
> package tarball on a network drive, with a local drive being used for 
> the session temporary directory.  The check code needs a copy of the 
> package installed in the temporary directory, and already has one in 
> the pkg.Rcheck directory where the check is taking place, so it tries 
> to create a junction linking them.  (On non-Windows systems it uses a 
> symlink.)
>
> Apparently the junction creation silently fails:  an empty directory 
> appears on the temp dir.  When R loads the package code, it doesn't 
> find it in the temp dir, and goes looking in other libraries, where it 
> found an older versions of the package.
>
> A workaround for this issue is to set the environment variable
>
>   R_WIN_NO_JUNCTIONS=yes
>
> before doing the check.  This causes the check code to copy all the 
> files into the temp dir and things are fine.
>
> I don't know whether the junction creation should have succeeded, or 
> whether it should have signalled an error when it didn't, but it might 
> make sense for R to do a simple sanity check after trying to create 
> the junction (e.g. test for the presence of DESCRIPTION in the newly 
> created location), falling back to a copy if things didn't succeed.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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