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

[Ben Bolker]

Just went back and re-read the mailing list thread -- I think my VM is
Solaris x86, so doesn't address the Sparc Solaris question anyway ...

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:
> For what it's worth I did install a Solaris VM on one of my machines
> so I could run tests.  This does seem a little over the top as a
> requirement for all package developers though ... I have easy access
> to MacOS and Ubuntu so I usually test there and on win-builder as
> well.
>
> In my case, I eventually found that the warnings (related to some
> parallelized code) could be reproduced in batch mode but *not* in
> interactive mode on Solaris, so I just gave up and disabled the tests
> on Solaris via     if (Sys.info()["sysname"] != "SunOS")  (shame on me
> ...)
>
> A wish-list/discussion item for the CRAN maintainers would to be add a
> step to the submission process, in between pushing the button to
> confirm submission to CRAN and any CRAN maintainers having to look at
> the submission/interact with the submitter, would be for the CRAN
> results to get posted somewhere the submitter could see them.  If
> there were errors or warnings the submission would be automatically
> rejected ... if there were notes the submitter would then have to add
> a comment/press another button justifying that it was OK to ignore
> them ... if the submission was completely clean it could automatically
> go on to the CRAN maintainers ...
>
> I don't know what the costs of this would be, beyond implementing it
> in the first place. It might encourage more load on the CRAN system by
> allowing developers to use it as a test rig (although the
> "automatically submit to CRAN if clean" behaviour would certainly
> discourage this), but it's hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't be
> worth it ...
>
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Viechtbauer Wolfgang (STAT)
> <wolfgang.viechtbauer at maastrichtuniversity.nl> wrote:
>> 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
>>
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