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

[Henrik Bengtsson]

To reproduce this, you can use tools:::.news_reader_default(), e.g.

> utils::download.file("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gertvv/rsmaa/master/smaa/NEWS", "NEWS", quiet = TRUE)
> news <- tools:::.news_reader_default("NEWS")
Warning messages:
1: Cannot process chunk/lines:
  smaa 0.3-0
2: Cannot process chunk/lines:
  smaa 0.2-5
...
9: Cannot process chunk/lines:
  smaa 0.1

You can check for attribute 'bad' to detect if there are parsing errors, e.g.

> bad <- which(attr(news, "bad"))
> news[bad, "Version"]
[1] "0.3-0" "0.2-5" "0.2-4" "0.2-3" "0.2-2" "0.2-1" "0.2"   "0.1-1" "0.1"

I have a check_news() [0] that does this job for me (it checks both
NEWS and NEWS.md), e.g.

> check_news("NEWS")
Error: Detected 9 malformed entries in 'NEWS': 0.3-0, 0.2-5, 0.2-4,
0.2-3, 0.2-2, 0.2-1, 0.2, 0.1-1, 0.1

Hope this helps,

/Henrik

[0] https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/dotfiles-for-R/blob/master/Rprofile.d/interactive%3DTRUE/check_news.R

On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 12:32 PM Ivan Krylov <krylov.r00t using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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