[R-pkg-devel] Travis/appveyor with CXX14/17

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 7 June 2019 at 10:13, Tim Keitt wrote:
| I bumped a package to CXX14/17 and it failed on Travis/Appveyor while
| checking fine locally. I assume I need to request different compilers or

Correct.

Working with a seriously outdated base layer of Ubuntu is a key bug^Hfeature
of Travis.  Maddening, really.

| something like that. Anyone have a quick recipe for that?

Yes.  In fact, two different ways.

i)  If you use the old Travis set up which is more shell-script alike, then
    one way is to use a PPA for nighlies/more current gcc or clang
    versions. I used to do that some client packages that needed newer
    compilers. An older example is still here

    https://github.com/eddelbuettel/cpptoml/blob/master/.travis.yml

ii) Screw Travis and use the fact that you can now bring your own Docker
    container.  That is much preferable as you are in _complete_ control of
    the test environment. I switched a few packages to this, particularly
    when they needed additional libraries which I was building / providing
    via a PPA anyway. Two examples:

      https://github.com/eddelbuettel/rquantlib/blob/master/.travis.yml
      https://github.com/rcppmlpack/rcppmlpack2/blob/master/.travis.yml

    If you don't need extra libraries then something like this container have
    R, recent toolchain and support for PPAs. I have been meaning to blog
    about it with an example:

      https://hub.docker.com/r/rocker/r-apt

    Obviously you can also start from vanilla Rocker's r-base, or any other
    Debian container.  Again,  your control, possibly also your initial work.

    A scheme I found helpful in a few repos is to create

      docker/ci/Dockerfile     -- base layer for CI, used by Travis
      docker/run/Dockerfile    -- above plus the actual repo code

    where the latter one is a simple container for users of the package.

Hth, Dirk

-- 
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