[R-pkg-devel] CRAN check for package on Sparc Solaris (or other architectures)

[Viechtbauer Wolfgang (STAT)]

Hello All,

First of all, thanks to Martin, Hadley, and Dirk (and everybody else involved) for setting up this new mailing list. I am sure this will become a tremendous resource for package developers.

My question is in essence just a repost of what I asked on R-devel a few weeks ago:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2015-May/071147.html

At the time, the 'metafor' package failed CRAN checks on Sparc Solaris.

To clarify: Before I submit a new version of metafor to CRAN, I check that it passes 'R CMD check --as-cran' on R-devel (both 64- and 32-bit), R-current (whatever version this is at the time), and the oldest version of R specified under 'Depends' (which is currently 3.1.0 for the metafor package) -- so 6 checks in total. All of these checks are run on Windows (yes, shoot me).

Admittedly, I screwed up on some package tests (using the 'testthat' package) -- using a few is_identical_to() instead of expect_equivalent() comparisons -- which I shouldn't have done in the first place. But all of these passed the 6 checks that I did. Not so on Sparc Solaris though (and apparently also not on x86_64 Linux with --disable-long-double, but as far as I can tell, http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_metafor.html does not indicate such a check).

At any rate, I try to check the package thoroughly before submitting -- but clearly not thorough enough. While my mistake was easy to remedy, the more general question is this: Is there any possibility of checking packages on various architectures, and especially Sparc Solaris, before submitting? Also, I don't know how often it happens that packages pass the various flavors of R on Windows/OSX/Linux but not on Sparc Solaris, so maybe this is really not much of an issue. But I plan on adding additional checks to the package so that code coverage is much higher -- so is CRAN itself then the only place where I can end up running all checks?

Best,
Wolfgang

--    
Wolfgang Viechtbauer, Ph.D., Statistician    
Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology    
School for Mental Health and Neuroscience    
Faculty of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences    
Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616 (VIJV1)    
6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands    
+31 (43) 388-4170 | http://www.wvbauer.com