[R-pkg-devel] Run-away R CMD check ?

[Uwe Ligges]

On 12.12.2015 17:34, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
> On 12 December 2015 at 11:00, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> | On 12/12/2015 9:30 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> | >
> | > For Rcpp and friends, I frequently run 'R CMD check' in "batch mode" over a
> | > large set of packages.  That works fine, apart from taking long :)
> | >
> | > I am using the exact same script (which is home-grown and could do with a
> | > revision, but is public at [1] -- basically just a big loop over a set of
> | > packages), and the exact same ~/.R/check.Renviron.
> | >
> | > Yet on the (bigger, better, newerm ...) machine at work I have three packages
> | > which get into a loop and never finish R CMD check.
> | >
> | > Any idea why / how and what to do?  Besides skipping these three packages
> | > which I'll do next?
> | >
> | > The only commonality is that all three use testthat, but so do many other
> | > packages that test fine.
> | >
> | > Dirk
> | >
> | > [1] https://github.com/RcppCore/rcpp-logs/blob/master/scripts/runRcppDepends.r
> | >
> |
> | I'd put a time limit on the process so it fails eventually, and then see
> | what the log shows just before the failure.  That is, I would if I could
> | remember how to do that.
>
> Yes. I thought about watcher processes too. But I haven't come up with
> something simple enough to implement.
>
> So for now I will just skip those three bad boys. Two of them, as I recall,
> are merely unreasonable and finish after a while.  The other way ran all night.
>
> I'd love to know how CRAN deals with that, or understand better why it
> doesn't bite me on the server at home.

CRAN has different approaches.

Under Windows, I typically have an R process that controls the check 
process and writes out the process id and timestamp and then starts R 
CMD check. Another watcher simply kills the process of a given process 
ID including all childs if they are beyond some timeout threshold.

Best,
Uwe