[R-pkg-devel] Spelling and manual CRAN inspection

[Sebastian Meyer]

Note that the spell checks are not run by default in R CMD check. To 
trigger these, you need to set the (undocumented) environment variable

_R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_USE_ASPELL_=TRUE

and have aspell (or alternatives) installed.

No worries about a potential pain of rechecking the same flagged words 
multiple times: Flagged words from the current CRAN version of the 
package are automatically filtered out (by default) if remote checks are 
enabled, i.e., if the environment variable

_R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_REMOTE_=TRUE

(if unset it is TRUE for --as-cran). I'm sure the CRAN team takes care 
of that.

Anyway, if you would like to setup a dedicated dictionary for your 
package, this is also possible, see the "Watch Your Spelling!" R Journal 
article by Kurt Hornik and Duncan Murdoch 
(https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011/RJ-2011-014/RJ-2011-014.pdf) 
and the details section in help("aspell-utils").

Best regards,

	Sebastian Meyer


Am 16.07.21 um 18:08 schrieb Kevin R. Coombes:
> Hi,
> 
>    I have been updating a couple of R packages this morning. One of them
> triggered a manual inspection for "possibly mis-spelled words in
> DESCRIPTION" for my last name (Coombes) --- even though none of the
> other 20 packages that I maintain has ever triggered that particular
> NOTE. A second package also triggered a manual inspection for
> mis-spelled words including "Proteomics". (These flags only arose on the
> debian CRAN machine, not the Windows CRAN machine, and not on my home
> machines. And let's ignore how many spelling corrections I had to make
> while typing this email)
> 
> *My question, however, is: why should this NOTE ever trigger a manual
> inspection?* That makes more work for the CRAN maintainers, who I am
> sure have better things to do than evaluate spelling. Anything that
> would actually stop the package from working (mis-spelling a keyword, or
> mis-spelling the name of package that is imported) is going to cause an
> automatic ERROR and a rejection of the submission without making more
> work for the CRAN maintainers. The other mis-spellings may reflect
> poorly on the package author, but since they are NOTEs, it is easy
> enough to get them fixed for the next round without making human
> eyeballs look at them.
> 
> Best,
>     Kevin
> 
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