[R-pkg-devel] Problem passing noSuggests test
Thank you for all answers! I agree that adopting a testing framework would be a better approach for future packages. However, as this particular package is not under active development, I was particularly looking for solutions that required less modifications of the current code. And from the answers and the code in the MASS-example, it seems the most straightforward fix in my particular case is to replace the print statements with stopifnot(all.equal(...)). The suggested package should in my case not produce different output than the original package, it just offers a different way of computing the same result when the two of them interact correctly. While I will not use the .rout.save modification examples here, they could be useful for other scenarios and for others who encounter this thread in the future. Thanks and best wishes, Jon
On Fri, 1 Aug 2025 at 16:39, Michael Chirico <michaelchirico4 at gmail.com> wrote:
I would emphasize/paraphrase Ivan's point -- using goldens (.Rout.save) for such tests is quite a headache. We do so for a very limited number of tests in {data.table} (something like 10 tests of over 10,000).
You could instead change the tests of Suggests behavior to be based on expectations, be that a framework like {testthat}/{RUnit}/{assertthat} or just the built-in tooling like stopifnot(), where you just quit/skip the checks when Suggests are unavailable.
Of course if you have a strong affinity for golden tests you can just split things into multiple test files. If it is a huge pain to disentangle which tests rely on Suggests behavior, that is a decent sign to me that maybe that package is not Suggests after all.
Mike C
On Fri, Aug 1, 2025, 7:29?AM Sebastian Meyer <seb.meyer at fau.de> wrote:
Am 31.07.25 um 11:09 schrieb Jon Olav Skoien:
Is there a different way of conditionally using the suggested package? Or do I have to use the IGNORE_RDIFF method?
To use *reference output* for optional tests, you could move these tests to a dedicated script with a corresponding .Rout.save file, put the files in a tests/ subdirectory, and use an .Rin file to include them only if the suggested package is available. I implemented a similar approach in the 'nlme' package to run extra tests with reference output conditionally on an environment variable, see <https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/nlme/tests/extras.Rin> for inspiration. -- Sebastian Meyer
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