[R-pkg-devel] Spell checking

[Thomas J. Leeper]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 5:42 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Hi Duncan,

Thank you for this. That appears to be the issue (the environment
variable). Setting that to TRUE causes R CMD check --as-cran to fail
in the absence of aspell:

* checking CRAN incoming feasibility ...Error in aspell(files, filter
= list("dcf", ignore = ignore), control = control,  :

  No suitable spell-checker program found
Execution halted

I'm not sure if it should fail like that as opposed to generating an
Error, but regardless, thanks for the help in tracking it down.
Getting that envvar mentioned in "R Internals" would be very helpful.

Good suggestions, too, regarding Winbuilder.

Thanks,
-Thomas