[R-pkg-devel] CRAN check texi2dvi failure

[Paul Gilbert]

I am trying to debug a problem that is appearing in the linux and 
Solaris checks, but not Windows or Mac checks, of my package tsfa as 
reported at
https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_tsfa.html

The problem is with re-building the vignette
   ...
   this is package 'tsfa' version '2014.10-1'
   ...
  checking re-building of vignette outputs ... [6s/9s] WARNING
  Error(s) in re-building vignettes:
   ...
     Running 'texi2dvi' on 'Guide.tex' failed.
     LaTeX errors:
     ! LaTeX Error: \verb ended by end of line.
   ...

In responding to the threat of removal I have also fixes some long 
standing warnings about adding imports to the NAMESPACE. The new version 
builds with --as-cran giving no errors or warnings with both R-devel on 
win-builder (2021-01-07 r79806) and on my linux machine (R 2021-01-08 
r79812 on Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia). When I submit it to CRAN the Windows 
build is OK but the same error happens at the 'texi2dvi' step in the 
debian vignette re-build.

This seems to happens after an example that correctly has a warning 
message (about Heywood cases). In my linux build the the warning happens 
but the message does not appear in the pdf output, so one possibility is 
that the handling of the warning on the CRAN Unix check machines fails 
to produce clean tex or suppress output. Another possibility is that my 
build using --as-cran is different from the actual CRAN build options. 
For example, my 00check.log shows
...
* checking package vignettes in ‘inst/doc’ ... OK
* checking re-building of vignette outputs ... OK
* checking PDF version of manual ... OK
* checking for non-standard things in the check directory ... OK
...

so I am not sure if it uses texi2dvi. (I haven't used dvi myself for a 
long time.)

I'm not sure how to debug this when I can't reproduce the error. 
Suggestions would be appreciated.

Paul Gilbert