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

[Ben Bond-Lamberty]

My intent wasn't particularly to blame CRAN, just puzzlement that a
normally-chatty test script is silently dying in this one case.
Anyway, thanks for the advice.
Ben



On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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