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uninformative error message when building package: ‘x’ must be an atomic vector

1 message · Dan Tenenbaum

#
Hi,

When building this Bioconductor package with R-devel:

http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/src/contrib/ROntoTools_1.1.2.tar.gz

I get the following:

[...]
Error: processing vignette ?rontotools.Rnw? failed with diagnostics:
?x? must be an atomic vector
Execution halted

If I install the package, Stangle and then source the vignette, I see that the "real" error is:

[...]
Error in La.svd(x, nu, nv) : error code 1 from Lapack routine 'dgesdd'

It would be great if R CMD build could produce this error instead of the uninformative 
?x? must be an atomic vector. 

I see this with many different packages and I always have to do the same dance in order to find out what is really going on.

BTW, I don't think it's referring to the x in the line of code right before the error, because that x is an atomic vector:
[1] "numeric"
[1] 2864

Thanks,
Dan