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

[Hong Ooi]

Hm, up to now my AzureR packages haven't met with any issues, and they are basically API wrappers.

I did have one reviewer ask for runnable examples when I submitted one package, but replying and pointing out the issues you mention cleared things up. I did cc Uwe Ligges in the reply, who approved the other packages in the first place -- the other reviewer probably just wasn't aware that I'd cleared things with Uwe previously.


-----Original Message-----
From: R-package-devel <r-package-devel-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Jim Hester
Sent: Wednesday, 2 October 2019 3:37 AM
To: R Package Development <r-package-devel using r-project.org>
Subject: [R-pkg-devel] CRAN policies with regards to runnable examples

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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