[R-pkg-devel] winUCRT failures

[Hadley Wickham]

> One additional thought:
>
> If the testing package (i.e. testthat in this case) had been available
> but other suggested packages were not, it would be worth running tests
> with just testthat present:  that might be why you called the decision
> defensible.  I'd agree with that.
>
> However, it's still true that the fact that testthat has to be present
> to make magrittr available is a pretty serious flaw in magrittr and/or
> the CRAN processes.  Hopefully magrittr's authors are less stubborn than
> R Core/CRAN, and will make their package more resilient.

Isn't this a 0/0 problem? If there are zero failures from zero tests,
do we really want to declare that the package is ok?

I'm not interested in participating in another debate about whether or
not one should assume that suggested packages are available when
checking a package. Some time ago, we decided to install all suggested
packages when running reverse dependency checks and it has caused us
few problems (especially since linux binaries for all CRAN packages
are now readily available). Either way, isn't it easier for the
handful of experienced developers who perform many R CMD check runs to
install all suggested packages, rather than trying to get thousands of
individual package maintainers to change their behaviour?

Hadley



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