[R-pkg-devel] Problems with too much testing

[Duncan Murdoch]

I'm updating the rgl package, and have come across the following problem.

Some packages that depend on rgl and do careful testing are detecting 
inconsequential changes.  A typical case is the nat package, which has 
extensive testing, some of which comes down to checking results from rgl 
functions using testthat::is_equal().  I rewrote some parts of the rgl 
code, and so some rgl objects differ in irrelevant ways.  For example,

   obj <- list(x = NULL)

differs from

   obj <- list()
   obj[["x"]] <- NULL

(the first is length 1, the second ends up with no entries).  All tests 
in rgl would be like

   if (is.null(obj[["x"]])) ...

so the tests evaluate the same, but testthat::is_equal() doesn't return 
TRUE, because the objects are different.

Another example would be

   obj <- list()
   obj$a <- 1
   obj$b <- 2

which differs from

   obj <- list()
   obj$b <- 2
   obj$a <- 1

in the order of the components, but since rgl always accessed them by 
name, that makes no difference.

So what I'm looking for is a strategy to hide internal implementation 
details.  (I'm using a compare_proxy() method now which standardizes the 
objects, but that seems very specific to testthat version 3.  I'd like 
ideas for something more robust.)

Duncan Murdoch