[R-pkg-devel] winUCRT failures

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/04/2021 11:35 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> 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.

I agree it's an error.  Back when we had one of those discussions it 
seemed too resource-intensive to do both kinds of tests, and it's much 
easier to do the "install everything" tests if you are always working 
with a fixed library.

Nowadays I think it's easier to run the tests on a VM that has exactly 
the packages you specify, so people have less excuse not to do that on 
their own.  I have a Github "workflow" here that does it for rgl:

https://github.com/dmurdoch/rgl/actions/workflows/R-CMD-nosoft-check.yml

BTW, I've just submitted another patch, this time for the usethis 
package, which added "Suggests: testthat" and then used testthat 
unconditionally.  That won't help any other existing packages, but if it 
is accepted it might help in the future.

Duncan