[R-pkg-devel] CRAN check for package on Sparc Solaris (or other architectures)

For what it's worth I did install a Solaris VM on one of my machines
so I could run tests.  This does seem a little over the top as a
requirement for all package developers though ... I have easy access
to MacOS and Ubuntu so I usually test there and on win-builder as
well.

In my case, I eventually found that the warnings (related to some
parallelized code) could be reproduced in batch mode but *not* in
interactive mode on Solaris, so I just gave up and disabled the tests
on Solaris via     if (Sys.info()["sysname"] != "SunOS")  (shame on me
...)

A wish-list/discussion item for the CRAN maintainers would to be add a
step to the submission process, in between pushing the button to
confirm submission to CRAN and any CRAN maintainers having to look at
the submission/interact with the submitter, would be for the CRAN
results to get posted somewhere the submitter could see them.  If
there were errors or warnings the submission would be automatically
rejected ... if there were notes the submitter would then have to add
a comment/press another button justifying that it was OK to ignore
them ... if the submission was completely clean it could automatically
go on to the CRAN maintainers ...

I don't know what the costs of this would be, beyond implementing it
in the first place. It might encourage more load on the CRAN system by
allowing developers to use it as a test rig (although the
"automatically submit to CRAN if clean" behaviour would certainly
discourage this), but it's hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't be
worth it ...


On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Viechtbauer Wolfgang (STAT)
<wolfgang.viechtbauer at maastrichtuniversity.nl> wrote:

Hello All,

First of all, thanks to Martin, Hadley, and Dirk (and everybody else involved) for setting up this new mailing list. I am sure this will become a tremendous resource for package developers.

My question is in essence just a repost of what I asked on R-devel a few weeks ago:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2015-May/071147.html

At the time, the 'metafor' package failed CRAN checks on Sparc Solaris.

To clarify: Before I submit a new version of metafor to CRAN, I check that it passes 'R CMD check --as-cran' on R-devel (both 64- and 32-bit), R-current (whatever version this is at the time), and the oldest version of R specified under 'Depends' (which is currently 3.1.0 for the metafor package) -- so 6 checks in total. All of these checks are run on Windows (yes, shoot me).

Admittedly, I screwed up on some package tests (using the 'testthat' package) -- using a few is_identical_to() instead of expect_equivalent() comparisons -- which I shouldn't have done in the first place. But all of these passed the 6 checks that I did. Not so on Sparc Solaris though (and apparently also not on x86_64 Linux with --disable-long-double, but as far as I can tell, http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_metafor.html does not indicate such a check).

At any rate, I try to check the package thoroughly before submitting -- but clearly not thorough enough. While my mistake was easy to remedy, the more general question is this: Is there any possibility of checking packages on various architectures, and especially Sparc Solaris, before submitting? Also, I don't know how often it happens that packages pass the various flavors of R on Windows/OSX/Linux but not on Sparc Solaris, so maybe this is really not much of an issue. But I plan on adding additional checks to the package so that code coverage is much higher -- so is CRAN itself then the only place where I can end up running all checks?

Best,
Wolfgang

--
Wolfgang Viechtbauer, Ph.D., Statistician
Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology
School for Mental Health and Neuroscience
Faculty of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences
Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616 (VIJV1)
6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands
+31 (43) 388-4170 | http://www.wvbauer.com