[R-pkg-devel] What is best practice for handling false negatives on CRAN submission tests?

[Daniel Kelley]

I submitted oce-1.7.2 to CRAN two days ago, in order to address problems that were uncovered in R-devel/linux CRAN tests. (The new gcc-12 that is on some CRAN machines is handy at uncovering potential problems.)

This version followed two prior submissions I had made on that day, 1.7.0 and 1.7.1, in which I progressively removed more and more URLs in docs that were failing.  As you can see, I was following what I think is the rule, in bumping the version number with each submission.

Anyway, the email I got back from CRAN told me that oce-1.7.2 had failed initial tests.  However, the email makes it seem that those tests had actually been passed.  Therefore, I wrote back to suggest that this might be a false negative (see Appendix below for the CRAN email, and my response).

My question for this list relates to time.  Would I be sensible to wait a couple of weeks for a reply? I ask because the schedule would have oce being auto-removed from CRAN early next month, and I worry a bit about that happening because of an email that went missing, or because I was unclear on how to communicate with CRAN.


# Appendix

I emailed the following at 3:53PM (Halifax time, i.e. UTC-3) on Mar 17, 2022.

```

My submission of 'oce' version 1.7-2 was rejected, although I see that the two tests both give Status as OK. Therefore, I'm wondering whether this is a false positive, and am writing this email as instructed. (This is the third trial of a submission, which initially aimed to solve a problem that was discovered by gcc-12 on a debian test machine. The system caught two other problems during submission, which had not been flagged in local tests, on winbulder, or on rhub tests.)

Please accept my apologies if there is something that I am missing.

Many thanks, both in advance for this and more generally, for the CRAN system.

Dan Kelley / Department of Oceanography / Dalhousie University / Canada

On Mar 17, 2022, at 3:37 PM, ligges using statistik.tu-dortmund.de wrote:

CAUTION: The Sender of this email is not from within Dalhousie.

Dear maintainer,

package oce_1.7-2.tar.gz does not pass the incoming checks automatically, please see the following pre-tests:
Windows: <https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/oce_1.7-2_20220317_190259/Windows/00check.log>
Status: OK
Debian: <https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/oce_1.7-2_20220317_190259/Debian/00check.log>
Status: OK

Last released version's CRAN status: OK: 3, NOTE: 6, WARNING: 1, ERROR: 3
See: <https://CRAN.R-project.org/web/checks/check_results_oce.html>

CRAN Web: <https://cran.r-project.org/package=oce>

Please fix all problems and resubmit a fixed version via the webform.
If you are not sure how to fix the problems shown, please ask for help on the R-package-devel mailing list:
<https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel>
If you are fairly certain the rejection is a false positive, please reply-all to this message and explain.

More details are given in the directory:
<https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/oce_1.7-2_20220317_190259/>
The files will be removed after roughly 7 days.

*** Strong rev. depends ***: argoFloats dendroTools morphomap seacarb skyscapeR soundecology SWMPr vprr

Best regards,
CRAN teams' auto-check service
Flavor: r-devel-windows-x86_64
Check: CRAN incoming feasibility, Result: NA
Maintainer: 'Dan Kelley <Dan.Kelley using Dal.Ca>'

Flavor: r-devel-windows-x86_64
Check: Overall checktime, Result: NOTE
Overall checktime 14 min > 10 min

Flavor: r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc
Check: CRAN incoming feasibility, Result: Note_to_CRAN_maintainers
Maintainer: 'Dan Kelley <Dan.Kelley using Dal.Ca>'
```