[R-pkg-devel] CRAN policies with regards to runnable examples

From now on, when I need to place a \dontrun{} anywhere, I will at initial

Hm, up to now my AzureR packages haven't met with any issues, and they are
basically API wrappers.

I did have one reviewer ask for runnable examples when I submitted one
package, but replying and pointing out the issues you mention cleared
things up. I did cc Uwe Ligges in the reply, who approved the other
packages in the first place -- the other reviewer probably just wasn't
aware that I'd cleared things with Uwe previously.


-----Original Message-----
From: R-package-devel <r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org> On Behalf
Of Jim Hester
Sent: Wednesday, 2 October 2019 3:37 AM
To: R Package Development <r-package-devel at r-project.org>
Subject: [R-pkg-devel] CRAN policies with regards to runnable examples

CRAN reviewers have somewhat recently been requesting that new submissions
have runnable examples. This is in general a good recommendation, but the
reviewers seem to apply this policy unconditionally, and there are certain
classes of packages where this is either extremely cumbersome or impossible
to do.

Two in particular are packages which wrap web APIs and packages containing
shiny applications. Even the most robust APIs will inevitably have network
failures, causing spurious failures on CRAN's machines, and often the APIs
require credentials to access, which won't be available on the build
machines. Shiny applications block the R process and require user
interaction in a browser to function, they cannot really be run
non-interactively.

In these cases it seems appropriate to put examples in a `\dontrun{}` or
`\donttest{}` block, and this is what is suggested by writing R extensions.
However CRAN reviewers have refused to accept packages taking this approach.

If these workarounds are not acceptable what _does_ CRAN want package
authors to do in these cases?

Jim