On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:48 AM, Claudia Beleites <cbeleites@units.it>wrote:

> On 01/18/2011 01:13 AM, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 7:00 PM, Spencer Graves<
>> spencer.graves@structuremonitoring.com>  wrote:
>>
>>  Hi, Dominick, et al.:
>>>
>>>
>>>      Demanding complete unit test suites with all software contributed to
>>> CRAN would likely cut contributions by a factor of 10 or 100.  For me,
>>> the R
>>> package creation process is close to perfection in providing a standard
>>> process for documentation with places for examples and test suites of
>>> various kinds.  I mention "perfection", because it makes developing
>>> "trustworthy software" (Chamber's "prime directive") relatively easy
>>> without
>>> forcing people to do things they don't feel comfortable doing.
>>>
>>>
>> I don't think I made myself clear, sorry. I was not suggesting that
>> package
>> developers include a complete unit
>> test suite. I was suggesting that unit testing should be done outside of
>> the
>> CRAN release process. Packages
>> should be submitted for "release" to CRAN after they have been tested (the
>> responsibility of the package
>> developers). I understand that the main problem here is that package
>> developers do not have access to
>> all supported platforms, so the current process is not likely to change.
>>
>
> Regarding access to all platforms: But there's r-forge where building and
> checks are done nightly for Linux, Win, and Mac (though for some months now
> the check protocols are not available for 32 bit Linux and Windows - but I
> hope they'll be back soon).
> I found it extremely easy to get an account & project space and building.
> Many thanks to r-forge!
>

Good point Claudia,

There are packages released to CRAN that
do not build on some platforms because the unit tests fail. It seems to me
that this kind of issue could be ironed out with the help of r-forge before
release, in which case there is no need to run the unit tests for released
packages.

Dominick

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

