[R-pkg-devel] Spell checking

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 20/06/2017 11:49 AM, Thomas J. Leeper wrote:
> I've now had two packages recently that had uncaught spelling errors
> (i.e., nothing on my local R CMD check --as-cran) that emerged only
> during CRAN submission. Is there a platform-specific component to the
> CRAN spellchecker or an option that must be specified explicitly to
> catch these?

I believe the spell checking is only done if you have the 
_R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_USE_ASPELL_ environment variable set to "TRUE" 
(or some equivalent string), and have the aspell program available.

In general, a lot of information about CRAN checks is in the R Internals 
manual in section 8, "Tools", but this appears to have been overlooked.

Another possible explanation for differences between CRAN checks and 
yours (which I don't think applies here) is that CRAN normally uses a 
very recent build of R-devel; you may be using a release version that 
hasn't had the checks added.

This is another reason why it's good to check your package on 
WinBuilder:  it not only checks on Windows (which might not be your 
development platform), but it probably has the most recent CRAN checks 
activated.  I'm not sure if this is also true of R-hub, but it does 
offer checks on other platforms.

Duncan Murdoch