[R-pkg-devel] advice on a rejected package (I think, because time was 13min, in excess of 10min limit)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 11 May 2022 at 19:07, Daniel Kelley wrote:
| Today I tried to update the CRAN oce package to version 1.7-3, to address a problem with 1.7-2 on one of the CRAN build platforms.  I used devtools::release() to submit it.  I just received the text I've pasted at the bottom of this email.  I've checked all the links, and my impression is that the sole problem is that the build took 13 minutes, which is over a 10-minute limit.
| 
| Since oce is a big package, I am not sure that removing the tests and documentation examples would reduce the time by 30%. There is a lot of C, C++ and fortran code that takes a while to build. And a package lacking code examples and a test suite is not likely to please my users, many of whom are scientists without deep coding experience.
| 
| During the previous submission, this time limit flag was also raised, and I asked R-package-devel for advice on what to do.  Someone suggested that I wait a week, in case a CRAN member would notice and put the package through. That worked, but my concern is whether this is the approach that makes for less work on the CRAN side.
| 
| So, I wonder whether the advice on this list is again to leave it alone and wait, or to contact CRAN?

The 'Overall checktime 13 min > 10 min' suggests to me that you should
condition some tests on an environment variable possibly present on your home
system, your CI setup, ... but not CRAN so that the default gets closer to
five minutes.

Of course it sucks that we have to reduce coverage but CRAN is also testing
18.5k packages, often recursively or in bulk when changes are considered to
time matters. So it is a defensible tradeoff.

Dirk

-- 
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