[R-pkg-devel] [patch] R CMD check when there are no .Rd examples

[Uwe Ligges]

There are packages where examples do not make sense, hence we do not 
generally reject such packages.

But if adding examples are reasonable we ask for them.

Best,
Uwe Ligges



On 10.05.2017 17:28, Neal Richardson wrote:
> Hi,
> Last week I submitted a new package to CRAN, and it was rejected
> because there were no examples in any of the man pages. That's a
> reasonable requirement--I just didn't know it was one. When I looked
> back at the R CMD check results locally, I saw
>
>     * checking examples ... NONE
>
> but the run still finished with
>
>     Status: OK
>
> so I believed that my package was good. The package did have usage
> examples in the test suite and on the readme file, and it was no
> problem to copy the examples over to a man page and resubmit. But it
> seemed like an unfortunate and avoidable waste of the CRAN
> maintainers' time to have to ask for revisions and review again.
>
> I read the source and saw that the requirement around .Rd examples
> that R CMD check does enforce is only when there are no examples, no
> vignettes, and no tests
> (https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/library/tools/R/check.R#L5100-L5117).
> The attached one-line patch makes the check for .Rd examples now log a
> "Note" rather than just print "NONE". Running it against my package
> without man-page examples, it shows
>
>     * checking examples ... NOTE
>     No examples
>
> and ends with
>
>     Status: 1 NOTE
>
> which should be enough to remind package authors to address it before
> submitting to CRAN.
>
> Thanks for considering this patch.
>
> Neal
>
> P.S. Since this is an issue about CRAN policy and package development,
> I thought R-package-devel was the appropriate list to email, but
> please let me know if I should send the patch to R-devel instead.
>
>
> patch.diff
>
>
> Index: src/library/tools/R/check.R
> ===================================================================
> --- src/library/tools/R/check.R	(revision 72665)
> +++ src/library/tools/R/check.R	(working copy)
> @@ -2868,7 +2868,7 @@
>                                   " check also with --run-donttest\n")
>                  }
>              } else {
> -                resultLog(Log, "NONE")
> +                noteLog(Log, "No examples")
>                  no_examples <<- TRUE
>              }
>          }
>
>
>
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