[Rd] Development version of R fails tests and is not installed

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 05/03/2019 08:54, Berwin A Turlach wrote:
> G'day all,
> 
> I have daily scripts running to install the patched version of the
> current R version and the development version of R on my linux box
> (Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS).
> 
> The last development version that was successfully compiled and
> installed was "R Under development (unstable) (2019-02-25 r76159)" on
> 26 February.  Since then the script always fails as a regression test
> seems to fail.  Specifically, in the tests/ subdirectory of my build
> directory I have a file reg-tests-1d.Rout.fail which ends with:
> 
>> ## checking ar.yw.default() multivariate case
>> estd <- ar(unclass(y) , aic = FALSE, order.max = 2) ## Estimate VAR(2)
>> es.d <- ar(unclass(y.), aic = FALSE, order.max = 2, na.action=na.pass)
>> stopifnot(exprs = {
> +     all.equal(est$ar[1,,], diag(0.8, 2), tol = 0.08)# seen 0.0038
> +     all.equal(est[1:6], es.[1:6], tol = 5e-3)
> +     all.equal(estd$x.mean, es.d$x.mean, tol = 0.01) # seen 0.0023
> +     all.equal(estd[c(1:3,5:6)],
> +               es.d[c(1:3,5:6)], tol = 1e-3)## seen {1,3,8}e-4
> +     all.equal(lapply(estd[1:6],unname),
> +               lapply(est [1:6],unname), tol = 2e-12)# almost identical
> +     all.equal(lapply(es.d[1:6],unname),
> +               lapply(es. [1:6],unname), tol = 2e-12)
> + })
> Error: lapply(es.d[1:6], unname) and lapply(es.[1:6], unname) are not equal:
>    Component "aic": Mean relative difference: 3.297178e-12
> Execution halted
> 
> Would it be possible to make this tolerance more lenient?  In case it
> matters, I am configuring R to be compiled using Openblas and this test
> fails for the 64 bit installation, the 32 bit installation seems to
> pass all tests.
> 
> Happy to provide any more information/context that might be needed.

The version of OpenBLAS is always helpful (a couple of bugs were fixed 
recently that impacted the checks in R packages).

I have a x86_64 Linux build with OpenBLAS 0.3.5 that I use for the 
'Additional issues' in package checking, and that passes its checks (and 
has ca weekly for years, even with the buggy versions of OpenBLAS).

Some aspects of the RNG were changed in r76160: to isolate change that 
you can (with current R-devel) use

setenv _R_RNG_VERSION_ 3.5.0

and re-check.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford