[R-pkg-devel] Re-building vignettes had CPU time 9.2 times elapsed time

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 25 August 2023 at 18:45, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| The real problem is that there are two stubborn groups opposing each 
| other:  the data.table developers and the CRAN maintainers.  The former 
| think users should by default dedicate their whole machine to 
| data.table.  The latter think users should opt in to do that.

No, it feels more like it is CRAN versus the rest of the world.

Take but one example, and as I may have mentioned elsewhere, my day job
consists in providing software so that (to take one recent example)
bioinformatics specialist can slice huge amounts of genomics data.  When that
happens on a dedicated (expensive) hardware with dozens of cores, it would be
wasteful to have an unconditional default of two threads. It would be the end
of R among serious people, no more, no less. Can you imagine how the internet
headlines would go: "R defaults to two threads". 

And it is not just data.table as even in the long thread over in its repo we
have people chiming in using OpenMP in their code (as data.table does but
which needs a different setter than the data.table thread count).

It is the CRAN servers which (rightly !!) want to impose constraints for when
packages are tested.  Nobody objects to that.

But some of us wonder if settings these defaults for all R user, all the
time, unconditional is really the right thing to do.  Anyway, Uwe told me he
will take it to an internal discussion, so let's hope sanity prevails.

Dirk
-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org