Shy Suggestion?
On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Jari Oksanen wrote:
On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 09:42 -0400, Roger D. Peng wrote:
I think this needs to fail because packages listed in 'Suggests:' may, for
example, be needed in the examples. How can 'R CMD check' run the examples and
verify that they are executable if those packages are not available? I suppose
you could put the examples in a \dontrun{}.
Yes, that's what I do, and exactly for that reason: if something is not
necessarily needed (= 'suggestion' in this culture), it should not be
required in tests. However, if I don't use \dontrun{} for a
non-recommended package, the check would fail and I would get the needed
information: so why should the check fail already when checking
DESCRIPTION?
Because it is a `check', and it assembles all the information needed at the beginning. I'd certainly prefer to know at the beginning rather than 20 minutes into running the tests. R CMD check is not really for end users: it is for package writers, repository maintainers and for people checking proposed R changes. Those people want all the checks possible to be done.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595