[R-pkg-devel] CRAN policies with regards to runnable examples

[Dr. rer. nat. Michael Thrun]

Hello Jim,
thank you for asking this question. I would also like to have a standard solution for this problem.

Best Regards
Michael


Michael Thrun
Postdoctoral Scholar
Databionics AG,
Mathematics and Computer Science

Philipps-Universität Marburg
Hans-Meerwein-Straße 6, 04A28
D-35032 Marburg

Phone +49 6421/ 28 23922
www.uni-marburg.de/fb12/datenbionik/

> On 1. Oct 2019, at 19:37, Jim Hester <james.f.hester using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> CRAN reviewers have somewhat recently been requesting that new
> submissions have runnable examples. This is in general a good
> recommendation, but the reviewers seem to apply this policy
> unconditionally, and there are certain classes of packages where this
> is either extremely cumbersome or impossible to do.
> 
> Two in particular are packages which wrap web APIs and packages
> containing shiny applications. Even the most robust APIs will
> inevitably have network failures, causing spurious failures on CRAN's
> machines, and often the APIs require credentials to access, which
> won't be available on the build machines. Shiny applications block the
> R process and require user interaction in a browser to function, they
> cannot really be run non-interactively.
> 
> In these cases it seems appropriate to put examples in a `\dontrun{}`
> or `\donttest{}` block, and this is what is suggested by writing R
> extensions. However CRAN reviewers have refused to accept packages
> taking this approach.
> 
> If these workarounds are not acceptable what _does_ CRAN want package
> authors to do in these cases?
> 
> Jim
> 
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