[R-pkg-devel] Recommended procedure for solving "Additional issues"?

[Uwe Ligges]

On 16.06.2018 21:46, Marius Hofert wrote:
> Dear DevelopeRs,
> 
> Is there a recommended procedure for addressing "Additional issues" if
> they appear on CRAN checks?
> 
> Say you have some C code in a package which checks fine (Status OK for
> all flavors) but shows "Additional issues" due to a potential memory
> problems. One can compile an R version configured with valgrind
> support and run a corresponding check on the package, but that
> a) ... sometimes shows false positives (on Mac, for example, as some
> have reported, see
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29312335/valgrind-on-os-x-yosemite-giving-bogus-errors)
> b) ... sometimes doesn't provide useful information (at least not in a
> case I recently ran into).
> c) Also, one can virtually not always check for all the "Additional
> issues" that might appear *before* submitting a package to CRAN -- or
> can one?
> 
> Concerning c), it would be great if there was a way to 'see' the
> "Additional issues" *before* submitting to CRAN (like a winbuilder or
> so). Is there? (I couldn't find anything in WRE). Otherwise, one can
> do the usual (like --as-cran), hope everything is fine, wait until the
> CRAN checks are reported, and then, if there are problems, carefully
> look at the code again, try and find the problem and resubmit in the
> hope that the problem is fixed => but that's not a good 'procedure' as
> it creates more work for CRAN etc.


Well, you can try to run with valgrind and the sanitizers before you 
submit to CRAN yourself. Or use R-hub which offers to use  builds with 
enabled sanitizers.

But you are right, running with valgrind + sanitizers + rchk (protection 
stack imbalance checks) + different BLAS installations is not feasible 
in case you do not suspect problems.

That is also the reason why CRAN does not always detect these issues in 
the incoming checks, as these checks run only on different specific 
machines in batches.

Best,
Uwe Ligges



> 
> Am I missing anything?
> 
> Thanks & cheers,
> Marius
> 
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