[R-pkg-devel] Understanding notes from win-builder

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 03/10/2016 1:22 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 12:10 PM, Roy Mendelssohn - NOAA Federal
> <roy.mendelssohn at noaa.gov> wrote:
> > Hi All:
> >
> > I am working on preparing a package for submission to CRAN, so using devtools i submitted the package to win-builder.  I really appreciate that this has been setup, so that hopefully any final submission will be smooth.  win-builder returned three notes, and I am unclear on them in the sense of not certain what I should do to resolve them so hopefully there will  be no notes on submission.  The first one is:
> >
> >> The Title field starts with the package name.
> >> The Title field should be in title case, current version then in title case:
> >> 'xtractomatic: An R package for accessing environmental data'
> >> 'Xtractomatic: An R Package for Accessing Environmental Data'
> >>
> >
> > the package name is "xtractomatic", but is the last line what is preferred in the DESCRIPTION file?
>
> On CRAN (and in other locations), packages are listed as
> "package_name: package_title", which in your case would lead to:
>
> xtractomatic: xtractomatic: An R package for accessing environmental data
>
> So you need to first eliminate "xtractomatic" from the title.  CRAN
> generally also considers "an R package" to be obvious from the context
> so you also need to remove that. That leaves you with "Accessing
> Environmental Data" and suggests you might want to be a bit more
> specific.
>
> > The other two notes are essentially the same:
> >
> >> * checking examples ...
> >> ** running examples for arch 'i386' ... [87s] NOTE
> >> Examples with CPU or elapsed time > 10s
> >>            user system elapsed
> >> xtracto    3.29   0.81   36.49
> >> xtracto_3D 3.14   0.64   31.40
> >> xtractogon 0.92   0.20   10.73
> >> ** running examples for arch 'x64' ... [104s] NOTE
> >> Examples with CPU or elapsed time > 10s
> >>            user system elapsed
> >> xtracto    2.83   0.64   43.68
> >> xtracto_3D 2.58   0.72   43.60
> >>
> >
> > I assume the problem here is the amount of time to run the examples.  The problem is that what this package does is download data from a remote server, and times can vary a lot on the examples.  Is this a show stopper when I submit to CRAN?  I can try to simplify the examples to cut down on the time.  Alternatively, will it help to include this in the cram-comments.md file?
>
> You can use \donttest{} to tell CRAN to not run it as part of their
> automated tests.

But do leave in some tests, so the code that actually does something 
with the data gets exercised, and users who may not have Internet access 
when they look at your examples can see something.

Duncan Murdoch