[R-pkg-devel] Debugging M1mac problems

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 27 March 2021 at 17:26, Ivan Krylov wrote:
| Dear R-package-devel,
| 
| My package "albatross" doesn't contain any compiled code and has been
| checked on both a POSIX-compatible system and on Windows, so I wasn't
| expecting any problems after seeing it pass CRAN "pretest" checks.
| Imagine my surprise when it failed a test on M1mac while reading some
| files that the test creates in a temporary directory:
| 
| https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/M1mac/albatross.out
| 
| Admittedly, I missed a chance to provide a useful test failure message
| here, so I only know that the names differ from my expectations, not
| what the differences are. I changed the function to output the actual
| differences, but so far wasn't able to reproduce the failure;
| apparently it's not a Mac-specific problem, since the package passed
| the test on R-hub's "CRAN-like" Mac setup:
| 
| https://artifacts.r-hub.io/albatross_0.3-0.tar.gz-6df95a00d916dc9c5ff28bdfe2a1e217/albatross.Rcheck/
| 
| I had an idea to rent some CPU time on an M1 machine (buying my own not
| being an option). The Web is full of ads for Scaleway offering exactly
| this service, but when I checked, they turned out to be out of stock.
| 
| I'm probably doing something stupid with the file names that usually
| works but isn't guaranteed to work in all cases, but I cannot figure it
| out. What should I do to debug this problem? I really don't want to be
| bothering CRAN with small updates that only help diagnose the problem
| instead of fixing it.
| 
| Please keep me Cc:-d in your replies if possible.

Looking at the CRAN mirror (thanks, Gabor) for your package shows (a common
but not apparently outlawed) practice of creating a temporary file:
 
  https://github.com/cran/albatross/search?q=tempfile
  
i.e.

  write.openfluor(factors, f1 <- tempfile(fileext = '.txt'))
  ... f2 <- tempfile(fileext = '.txt')   ...
  
and I think we are now being asked to no longer leave these files behind
(whereas in the past we were asked to create them _exactly this way_).

Christoph and I are having the same issue right now with x13binary and
seasonal; the corrected version of x13binary is however currently archived
and I have not yet heard back from CRAN on my reply to the (to me false
positive) automatic archival of x13binary. I plan to send an email in a day
or two if it does not get resolved before then.

Dirk

-- 
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org