[R-pkg-devel] winUCRT failures

[Ott Toomet]

I think part of the problem is that the corresponding section in "Writing R
extensions" is not very clear for newcomers.  I admit I have read it
several times as I have been confused about the difference between suggest,
imports and depends, and so combed section 1.1.3 repeatedly.  But from this
email thread I realize that I have overlooked some of the basics.

I would like to have an authoritative document (preferably WRE) that
provides some sort of clear distinction between these concepts, including a
few examples.  In particular, the fact that one should wrap the suggested
packages in "requireNamespace" has escaped me.  I guess it is not just me
as a large chunk of package authors are applied researchers and not
professional software developers.

Not sure if one should rewrite the docs here, or maybe alternatively create
some sort of simplified version of the document.

Cheers,
Ott

On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 8:36 AM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> 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.
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-package-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]