From maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch  Sat Nov  5 21:53:08 2016
From: maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch (Martin Maechler)
Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2016 21:53:08 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Running package tests and not stop on first fail
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Message-ID: <20161105205308.2E1FB140692@ion-3.math.ethz.ch>

>>>>> Oliver Keyes <ironholds at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 4 Nov 2016 12:42:54 -0400 writes:

    > On Friday, 4 November 2016, Martin Maechler
    > <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:

    >> >>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org <javascript:;>>
    >> >>>>> on Fri, 4 Nov 2016 10:36:52 -0500 writes:
    >> 
    >> > On 4 November 2016 at 16:24, Martin Maechler wrote: |
    >> My > proposed name '--no-stop-on-error' was a quick shot;
    >> if | > somebody has a more concise or better "English
    >> style" > wording | (which is somewhat compatible with all
    >> the other > options you see | from 'R CMD check --help'),
    >> | please > speak up.
    >> 
    >> > Why not keep it simple?  The similar feature this most
    >> > resembles is 'make -k' and its help page has
    >> 
    >> > -k, --keep-going
    >> 
    >> > Continue as much as possible after an > error.  While
    >> the target that failed, and those that > depend on it,
    >> cannot be remade, the other dependencies of > these
    >> targets can be processed all the same.
    >> 
    >> Yes, that would be quite a bit simpler and nice in my
    >> view.  One may think it to be too vague,

    > Mmn, I would agree on vagueness (and it breaks the pattern
    > set by other flags of human-readability). Deep familiarity
    > with make is probably not something we should ask of
    > everyone who needs to test a package, too.

    > I quite like stop-on-error=true (exactly the same as the
    > previous suggestion but shaves off some characters by
    > inverting the Boolean)

Thank you, Brian, Dirk and Oliver for these (and some offline)
thoughts and suggestions!

My current summary:

1) I really don't want a  --<option-key>=value
   but rather stay with logical/binary variables that "express
   themselves"... in the same way I strongly prefer

       if (A_is_special)       ....
   to
       if (A_special == TRUE)  ....

   for a logical variable A_* .   Yes, this is mostly a matter
   of taste,.. but related to how R style itself "works"

2) Brian mentioned that this is only about ./tests/ tests which
   are continued, not about the Examples which are treated separately.
   That's why we had contemplated additionally using 'tests' (because that's 
   the directory name used for unit/regression/.. tests) in the option
   name.

Even though Brian is correct, ideally we *would* want to also influence the
examples' running to *not* stop on a first error..   However that would
need more work, reorganizing how the examples are run and that may not be
worth the pain.   However it should be considered a goal in the long run.

After all that, I tend to remain with the original proposed name. It is at
least easy to pronounce and spell correctly...

Martin



[Rd] Running package tests and not stop on first fail
Martin Maechler