R devel - Apr 2018 - R 3.5.0 fails its regression test suite on Linux/x86_64

Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> writes:

 > You can likely get rid of most of them by building with the recommended
 > packages.

unfortunately, this is not an option for us. For various reasons, our
build process requires that we build those packages separately. Ricardo
appears to be in a similar situation and he has outlined some of those
reasons already in his message.

Anyway, it would be FAR better for us if "make check" would simply
succeed in the configuration we're using. We'd be perfectly happy to
have those tests disabled that cannot be executed without the
recommended packages available.

Is there a way to accomplish that?

Best regards,
Peter

On 23 April 2018 at 15:14, Peter Simons wrote:
| Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> writes:
| 
|  > You can likely get rid of most of them by building with the recommended
|  > packages.
| 
| unfortunately, this is not an option for us. For various reasons, our
| build process requires that we build those packages separately. Ricardo
| appears to be in a similar situation and he has outlined some of those
| reasons already in his message.
| 
| Anyway, it would be FAR better for us if "make check" would simply
| succeed in the configuration we're using. We'd be perfectly happy to
| have those tests disabled that cannot be executed without the
| recommended packages available.
| 
| Is there a way to accomplish that?

I have been doing for R for about 20 years (if you count the time I assisted
Doug Bates when he was still the maintainer) (and longer for Debian), and you
seem to follow the same model we set up years ago of splitting the content of
r-recommended (itself a virtual package) off r-base-core.

You simply need to do this in stages.

As Duncan stated, this is not a concern for R Core as they offer us a way to
test the set.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org

Hi Dirk,

 > I have been doing for R for about 20 years (if you count the time I
 > assisted Doug Bates when he was still the maintainer) (and longer for
 > Debian), and you seem to follow the same model we set up years ago of
 > splitting the content of r-recommended (itself a virtual package) off
 > r-base-core.
 >
 > You simply need to do this in stages.

I have packaged free software for 20+ years for many different distributions,
and, in fact, I'm doing that professionally these days as an employee of one
of
the largest commercial Linux distributors. So please trust my expertise when I
tell you that this is not what I want.

What I want is

  ./configure --without-recommended-packages && make && make
check

to succeed without error, and I don't think that's an unreasonable
expectation.

I have reported these kind of errors before in past, and back then a friendly R
developer simply took a moment to disable the offending tests when the build
was configured with this particular flag and that solved the problem. I would
hope that this is the outcome we can achieve this time, too.

If no-one wants to make those changes for whatever reason, then that's fine
and
I'll just disable the test suite in NixOS to make the build succeed. I feel
like
that would be a sub-optimal solution, though.

Best regards,
Peter