[R-pkg-devel] CRAN check fails on NEWS

[Ivan Krylov]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2023 20:38:36 +0200
Gert van Valkenhoef <gert using gertvv.nl> wrote:

> I'm hoping you can help me understand this new CRAN check failure
> that occurs on Debian but not on Windows:

Unfortunately, not all checks are enabled on all check machines.

> * checking package subdirectories ... NOTE
> Problems with news in ‘NEWS’:
>    Cannot process chunk/lines:
>      smaa 0.3-0
>    ... etc ...

Your NEWS file at
<https://github.com/gertvv/rsmaa/blob/master/smaa/NEWS> looks like
valid Markdown to me. In fact, I can parse it using R's NEWS.md parser
without any warnings, so in order to solve the problem, you just need
to rename it to NEWS.md.

R's requirements for "plain text" NEWS files are documented in
help(news) (together with requirements for NEWS.md and NEWS.Rd).

> The same package passes the same check on  Debian r-devel on r-hub
> (see the full build log:
> HTML
> <https://builder.r-hub.io/status/smaa_0.3-2.tar.gz-6ab795be6475b44b1ec363a82c45a2cb>, 

Are they running R CMD check without --as-cran? This could be the
reason why they didn't pick up this problem sooner. Running
rhub::check_for_cran() will run a more comprehensive set of checks on
your package.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan