[Rd] possible bug in win R-devel in check/test environment

[Serguei Sokol]

Hi,

During my recent r2sundials development, I've came across a strange test 
failing during 'R CMD check' exclusively on win R-devel which I could 
reproduce with a minimal example that I present here.
The toy packages testarma1 [1] and testarma2 [2] are minimal 
modifications of a skeleton package produced by 
RcppArmadillo.package.skeleton().
They are almost identical. The first one fails to passe its tests on win 
R-devel [3] while the second one is OK [4]. The reason of test failing 
in testarma1 boils down to not finding a package during tests (here 
RcppArmadillo) although it is well present in LinkingTo field of the 
DESCRIPTION file (the mechanism of the error is detailed in [5]). To 
make the tests pass, I had to add RcppArmadillo and r2sundials to 
'Suggests:' field too (as can be seen in testarma2)

In my understanding, the presence of a package name in the LinkingTo 
field should be sufficient for finding it during the test phase. 
Instead, one have to add it to 'Suggests:' field too.

Am I wrong or this behavior is unexpected?

Best,
Serguei.

[1] https://github.com/sgsokol/testarma1 
<https://github.com/sgsokol/testarma2>
[2] https://github.com/sgsokol/testarma2
[3] https://win-builder.r-project.org/v0nBoFleT48y/00check.log
[4] https://win-builder.r-project.org/TMKbnEBncFNc/00check.log
[5] https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp/issues/1026

<https://github.com/sgsokol/testarma2>