[R-SIG-Mac] OSX Binary Installation and testInstalledPackages()

[Simon Urbanek]

Marc,

On Feb 1, 2012, at 12:13 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have been building R from source for a number of years on Linux and for the past 3 years, on OSX. Since circa version 2.9.0 I believe, there have been functions available in the 'tools' package to run post-installation tests of the base and recommended packages. These parallel the post-build from source 'make check-all' functionality, but can be run within R. They run the help file examples, more extensive package specific tests as well as vignette code when present.
> 
> When building from source, one can run 'make install-tests' to install the required files to run the more extensive package tests after the initial build, rather then just the examples in the help files.
> 
> On Windows, there is an option during the GUI installation of the pre-built binary, to install these additional test files.
> 
> When installing the pre-built binary for OSX, just to consider that path, I did not see an option to install these test files and I don't see any CLI functionality to replicate the installation of the test files that would be performed when building from source. A search of the R.framework tree did not yield any indication that the files are present, which would normally be in a 'tests' folder (eg. see https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-2-14-branch/tests/).
> 
> So, are these files not installed or made available when using the OSX binary or am I missing something?

Yes, they are not available in the binary distribution. You can still use make install-tests when compiling your own R, and since they are arch-independent you can pick any architecture for that.

It would be certainly possible to include the test files in the distribution, but so far you are the first person asking about that, so it doesn't seem prudent. However, it would be even easier to just add a separate tar ball of tests to the http://R.reasearch.att.com site for nightly builds if that would satisfy your needs.

Cheers,
Simon



> I did not see anything relevant in the OSX FAQ for R and a search of the manuals and the archives yielded no joy. Presumably, one can just copy the files from the SVN repo above, being sure to match rev numbers during the check-out.
> 
> Thanks for any insights.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc Schwartz
> 
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