[R-pkg-devel] Failing vignette engine for package rasciidoc on solaris

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 23/11/2020 7:07 a.m., Andreas Dominik Cullmann via R-package-devel wrote:
> Dear List,
> one of my packages, rasciidoc (a simple wrapper to 'knitr' and 'asciidoc'),
> includes a minimal vigentte engine.
> When submitting the package with a vignette using that engine, the vignette is
> re-built on all platforms except for r-patched-solaris-x86:
> https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_rasciidoc.html
> https://www.r-project.org/nosvn/R.check/r-patched-solaris-x86/rasciidoc-00check.html
> 
> Maybe rasciidoc's vignette engine is somewhat superfluous, but since it works
> for all platforms except solaris, I kind of would like to use it.
> 
> I cannot reproduce the error using rhub:
>    ## Test environments
>    - R-hub solaris-x86-patched-ods (r-release)
>    
>    ## R CMD check results
>    ❯ On solaris-x86-patched-ods (r-release)
>      checking CRAN incoming feasibility ... WARNING
>      Maintainer: ‘Andreas Dominik Cullmann <fvafrcu using mailbox.org>’
>      
>      Insufficient package version (submitted: 2.2.1, existing: 2.2.1)
>      
>      Days since last update: 5
>    
>    ❯ On solaris-x86-patched-ods (r-release)
>      checking top-level files ... NOTE
>      Files ‘README.md’ or ‘NEWS.md’ cannot be checked without ‘pandoc’ being installed.
>    
>    ❯ On solaris-x86-patched-ods (r-release)
>      checking examples ... NOTE
>      Examples with CPU (user + system) or elapsed time > 5s
>                 user system elapsed
>      rasciidoc 2.724  0.352   48.75
>    
>    0 errors ✔ | 1 warning ✖ | 2 notes ✖
> 
> 
> And I happen to have no solaris box at hand for testing.
> Does anybody have any suggestion on how I could tackle this?

The error message says:   "Can't find program `source-highlight`. Please 
install first (http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite/)."  You have 
listed this in SystemRequirements as "recommended", but even if you had 
listed it as required, your build shouldn't fail if it is not found:  it 
should test for that program, and continue on if it is not there.  For 
example, it could output a vignette containing nothing except the 
warning message that source-highlight is needed to build the vignette. 
This is described in Section 1.6, "Writing portable packages", of 
Writing R Extensions.

Duncan Murdoch