[Bioc-devel] Updated check results page
so perhaps there could be some descriptive text accessible via linked at the top (e.g., what to do if your package is not OK) which gives general suggestions on how to improve status
Good idea. Perhaps a Bioconductor package bug fixing How To. Are you volunteering to draft something ;-)
I would be willing to start on this. This isn't truly about bug fixing, though, it is primarily about responding to the findings on the package check page. This involves 1) understanding the vocabulary of check status results - "WARNINGS/ERROR": i need to look through some examples to see what kind of documentation would be helpful here -- we should write up what to do for the most prevalent problems - builds but doesn't pass check ... this is a somewhat obscure situation, may relate to platform or java dependencies. We want to help developers avoid this. - "OK" -- i guess this is what we are shooting for, but there may be a need for more refinement here -- some conditions like vignette lacks keywords, or package lacks vignette, or too many functions are aliased without proper pages/examples, can be present with packages in OK status. such packages are OK by a very particular criterion, but in reality need more development. 2) understanding relationship between platform used and check status results. i suppose that we get between-platform discrepancies when portable coding is not used, and we can give pointers on that in a document. we should provide clear guidance to people on how they can build and check their own packages on windows machines -- if it looks like people are just avoiding that superficially. (we could assemble the links to the required tools and quick installation notes in one of our pages for this purpose). Perhaps what we really need is to put some information about this in the "How to create Bioconductor packages" document -- we have some links that relate to this on the developer page but we may need something much more concrete, along the lines of Writing R Extensions, and this would point developers directly to the check status page -- which really needs to be as self-documenting as possible.