[R-pkg-devel] winUCRT failures

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 25 April 2021 at 11:14, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| What I haven't tried to do is check any of them if *none* of the 
| suggested packages is available.  Packages should still build and check 
| without ERRORs in this case, though I'd expect NOTEs and/or WARNINGs.
| 
| This is an old issue:  what packages should be present during CRAN 
| checks?  Currently CRAN tries to check with everything present; perhaps 
| it should also try to check with the minimal set.

I last wrote about that four years ago under the title "Suggests != Depends"
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/03/22#suggests_is_not_depends

Of course, nothing changed.

So when helping a R Core member last weekend by checking his package against
just over 1000 reverse dependencies, I again had to manually wade through
dozens of false errors of packages failing tests when packages they did NOT
declare a dependency on were used unconditionally. That is still a very clear
error to me, but I no longer expect these windmills will ever stop turning.

Dirk

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