[R-pkg-devel] help interpreting a response from CRAN

[Ben Bolker]

    Thanks all for the help.  The reward (as usual) is another dumb 
question.

If I add up the elapsed times listed in

https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/lme4_1.1-26_20201122_184744/Windows/examples_and_tests/examples_x64/lme4-Ex.timings

   I get 21.43 seconds.  But the output in

https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/lme4_1.1-26_20201122_184744/Windows/00check.log

says

** running examples for arch 'x64' ... [41s] OK

  The values for i386 have a similar discrepancy (20.6 vs 36s).  I can 
appreciate that would be a bit of overhead (and rounding error), but ... 
? (there are a total of 61 examples)

   I wouldn't normally worry about the discrepancy, but I'm doing my 
best to shave seconds where I can ...  can anyone see any obvious thinkos?

   I might as well add (in my partial defense, in response to Uwe's 
point about not needing real-world/big examples for tests); many of 
lme4's tests are regression tests of edge cases that came up in the real 
world with moderately sized data sets.  *In principle* it might be 
possible to find a way to reduce those medium-sized problems to small, 
fast problems that still demonstrated the same numerical problems, but 
it's hard and time-consuming (at least for me) ...

   cheers
     Ben Bolker





On 11/22/20 4:06 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> Thanks Dirk. Yes, for lme4 the tests for each archiecture take longer 
> than 5 min, so the overall check time exceeds 10 min.
> 
> So one can follow Dirk's advise.
> 
> As a general remark for others who will read this in the future:
> tests should test the software, but it is generally not important to 
> have real world examples. Small data and few iterations are typically 
> sufficient for tests.
> It is also possible to run less important tests only conditionally if 
> some environment variable is set that you only define on your machine.
> 
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 22.11.2020 20:36, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>>
>> On 22 November 2020 at 13:44, Ben Bolker wrote:
>> |    My current guess is that the problem is with the too-long check 
>> time on Windows (NOTE: "Overall checktime 18 min > 10 min")
>>
>> Yes.
>> |   I guess I have to get busy setting more tests and examples to 
>> skip-on-CRAN (kind of a pain as there's no low-hanging fruit - other 
>> than the 'testthat' tests, none of the individual test files take 
>> longer than 15sec, although this is doubled because they have to be 
>> run on 386 and x64 ...)
>>
>> It's under your control. You can detect 'are we on Windows' and branch 
>> or, as
>> I do with test runner I use, exit_file("...") based on such conditions.
>>
>> |   An alternative is that this is a confusingly worded message 
>> indicating that there are strong rev dependencies so the package needs 
>> to be further checked? (That seems unlikely as it explicitly asks me 
>> to resubmit)
>>
>> No. If there were any (even false positive ones) they'd be listed there.
>>
>> Hth, Dirk
>>