From rpeng at jhsph.edu  Tue Sep 20 16:03:50 2005
From: rpeng at jhsph.edu (Roger D. Peng)
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 10:03:50 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Shy Suggestion?
In-Reply-To: <1127224092.21824.20.camel@biol102145.oulu.fi>
References: <1127222728.21824.15.camel@biol102145.oulu.fi>	
	<433011BE.8090007@jhsph.edu>
	<1127224092.21824.20.camel@biol102145.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <433016C6.3090100@jhsph.edu>

I think the reason is that the standard for 'R CMD check' is that examples in 
help pages are guaranteed to be executable by the user (as long as the 
requirements are met).  There is no way to guarantee this without having the 
packages installed.  So strictly speaking, the 'Suggested' packages are not 
needed by the *user*, but are needed by the *maintainer*.

Perhaps, you differ with the standard itself, but I personally think it's a good 
one.

-roger

Jari Oksanen wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 09:42 -0400, Roger D. Peng wrote:
> 
>>I think this needs to fail because packages listed in 'Suggests:' may, for 
>>example, be needed in the examples.  How can 'R CMD check' run the examples and 
>>verify that they are executable if those packages are not available?  I suppose 
>>you could put the examples in a \dontrun{}.
>>
> 
> Yes, that's what I do, and exactly for that reason: if something is not
> necessarily needed (= 'suggestion' in this culture), it should not be
> required in tests. However, if I don't use \dontrun{} for a
> non-recommended package, the check would fail and I would get the needed
> information: so why should the check fail already when checking
> DESCRIPTION?
> 
> cheers, jari oksanen
> 

-- 
Roger D. Peng
http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/



[Rd] Shy Suggestion?
Roger D. Peng