[R-pkg-devel] Diagnosing error on CRAN's old R, old Windows

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 08/10/2015 8:06 AM, Ben Bond-Lamberty wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> My recent package was accepted and posted by CRAN, but the check
> results (https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_luzlogr.html)
> show an error for flavor 'r-oldrel-windows-ix86+x86_64'. Everything
> else passes fine. Unfortunately the error diagnostics are not
> particularly helpful, only showing that four tests failed; the only
> common thread I see, maybe, is that all four tests--and no others--use
> R's file.size() function.
> 
> Any suggestions on figuring out what's going on? Is this necessary to
> fix? I'd rather not track down an old Windows machine and install an
> old R release on it just to debug, though will if necessary.

Those errors came in your own test script, so you should be able to make
the messages more informative.  Don't blame CRAN for that.

You shouldn't need an old Windows machine, just an old release of R.
The result script shows that R-oldrel is 3.1.3; a binary for that is
available on CRAN.  (Of course, it's possible that the error is specific
to the version of Windows on the CRAN machine, but it's pretty easy to
find out if the problem is reproducible on whatever Windows machine you
do have.)

Duncan Murdoch