[R-pkg-devel] Problems on R-devel because of changes in stats family function

[Rossum, Bart-Jan van]

Hi,

When submitting a new version of my LMMsolver package to CRAN, it fails on the automated tests, see:

Windows: https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/LMMsolver_1.0.5_20230407_120945/Windows/00check.log

I managed to track this down to a change in the output of the family function in the stats package:
https://search.r-project.org/R/refmans/stats/html/family.html

More specifically, it is about a new output in the call to family():

dispersion
(optional since R version 4.3.0) numeric: value of the dispersion parameter, if fixed, or NA_real_ if free.

Even though the documentation seems to suggest this output is optional, I don't see a way to suppress it. In all my calls to family I get an extra output dispersion with value NA.
I need to store the family information in my own outputs for further processing. Also my output are quite complex by themselves so I tend to check my full output objects with outputs previously stored.
Exactly this is giving me problems now. In R 4.3 all of my outputs will have an extra item as well, causing the tests to fail.

I am not sure how to solve this. I could suppress the affected tests when an installation of stats with version >= 4.3 is detected, but that doesn't feel good.
Do you have any other suggestions on how to solve this.

Thanks in advance,
Bart-Jan