[R-pkg-devel] Warning on r-oldrel-macos-x86_64

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/10/2020 6:10 a.m., Helmut Schütz wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> we faced a warning on r-oldrel-macos-x86_64:
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_PowerTOST.html
> I'm not concerned about "Pandoc (>= 1.12.3) and/or pandoc-citeproc not
> available" in the first 5 vignettes since there were no problem in the
> previous releases.
> However I found this on stackoverflow:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50789125/how-to-get-an-rmarkdown-vignette-for-r-package-to-escape-cran-warnings-on-solari
> RolandAsc commented:
> "In my understanding you can only see this warning if there is an error
> (either because warnings are being converted to errors or because there
> is another subsequent error), else it just doesn't come through. This is
> not an answer but maybe an explanation."
> Seems to be correct. In my code a data.frame is assigned with a column
> "foo" and _without_ stringsAsFactors = FALSE. Later a function is called
> which requires "foo" as character.
> The default stringsAsFactors was changed to FALSE in R4.0.0. Hence, my
> question: How "old" is the old releaseon CRAN's test machines/ macos?
> oldrel on windows is OK.
> 
> What shall we do?
> Re-submit with the same release-number(either add stringsAsFactors =
> FALSE or call the function with as.character("foo")with an explanation?

By not specifying stringsAsFactors = FALSE, your vignette depends on R 
 >= 4.0.0, so you should

  - state that dependency in the DESCRIPTION file, or

  - test for it in the vignette, or

  - remove the dependency by being explicit about stringsAsFactors = FALSE.

Duncan Murdoch