[R] Reverse dependency checking

[Ben Bolker]

   For what it's worth I use https://github.com/r-lib/revdepcheck (see 
also https://revdepcheck.r-lib.org/ ) ... it has some of its own warts, 
but it has a very informative progress bar.

On 2025-02-13 8:43 a.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 2025-02-12 4:42 p.m., Lenth, Russell V via R-help wrote:
>> Dear R-Help,
>>
>> When I submit an update to one of my packages, I decided to try to 
>> avoid having to fix errors that sometimes occur in CRAN's reverse- 
>> dependency checks by performing the same checks ahead of time. From 
>> what I can tell, the way to do this is to use
>>
>>      tools::check_packages_in_dir(..., reverse = list(which = 
>> "all"), ...)
>>
>> It does not surprise me that this takes a lot of time! One of my 
>> packages has quite a few reverse suggests, so this process installs 
>> all packages that my package or any of the reverse depends requires, 
>> which is about a zillion. But eventually, this works. I've learned to 
>> run this in batch mode so it doesn't tie up Rgui or RStudio. That's 
>> fine; I just have a script that I can run.
>>
>> I have two questions:
>>
>> 1. While it is installing all those packages, I see a lot of chatter 
>> so I can see what progress is being made, however glacial. But when it 
>> gets the the phase where it checks each of the reverse-dependent 
>> packages, it is utterly silent. It would be really helpful to me if 
>> check_packages_in_dir() would just print a one-line message that it is 
>> checking such-and-such package.
> 
> There are several re-implementations of that code.  Jeroen pointed you 
> to one, I think devtools has another.  You should try those.
>>
>> 2. Is there any way to streamline the checking? It seems to me that 
>> since all the packages are already on CRAN and thus pass most checks, 
>> all that we need to check for reverse dependencies are the examples, 
>> vignettes, and tests. This could save a lot of time.
> 
> I think there can't be.  You may have dropped some export, or changed 
> its behaviour.  Even suggested packages can be used anywhere (with tests 
> that they are installed), so your changes could conceivably have bad 
> effects in lots of strange ways. There are probably a few of the checks 
> that could be dropped, but not most of them.
> 
> Duncan
> 
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-- 
Dr. Benjamin Bolker
Professor, Mathematics & Statistics and Biology, McMaster University
Director, School of Computational Science and Engineering
 > E-mail is sent at my convenience; I don't expect replies outside of 
working hours.