xfun (version 0.4)

rev_check: Run R CMD check on the reverse dependencies of a package

Description

Install the source package, figure out the reverse dependencies on CRAN, download all of their source packages, and run R CMD check on them in parallel.

Usage

rev_check(pkg, which = "all", recheck = FALSE, ignore = NULL, update = TRUE, 
    src = file.path(src_dir, pkg), src_dir = getOption("xfun.rev_check.src_dir"))
compare_Rcheck(status_only = FALSE, output = "00check_diffs.md")

Arguments

pkg

The package name.

which

Which types of reverse dependencies to check. See tools::package_dependencies() for possible values. The special value 'hard' means the hard dependencies, i.e., c('Depends', 'Imports', 'LinkingTo').

recheck

Whether to only check the failed packages from last time. By default, if there are any *.Rcheck directories, recheck will be automatically set to TRUE if missing.

ignore

A vector of package names to be ignored in R CMD check. If this argument is missing and a file 00ignore exists, the file will be read as a character vector and passed to this argument.

update

Whether to update all packages before the check.

src

The path of the source package directory.

src_dir

The parent directory of the source package directory. This can be set in a global option if all your source packages are under a common parent directory.

status_only

If TRUE, only compare the final statuses of the checks (the last line of 00check.log), and delete *.Rcheck and *.Rcheck2 if the statuses are identical, otherwise write out the full diffs of the logs. If FALSE, compare the full logs under *.Rcheck and *.Rcheck2.

output

The output Markdown file to which the diffs in check logs will be written. If the markdown package is available, the Markdown file will be converted to HTML, so you can see the diffs more clearly.

Details

Everything occurs under the current working directory, and you are recommended to call this function under a designated directory, especially when the number of reverse dependencies is large, because all source packages will be downloaded to this directory, and all *.Rcheck directories will be generated under this directory, too.

If a source tarball of the expected version has been downloaded before (under the tarball directory), it will not be downloaded again (to save time and bandwidth).

After a package has been checked, the associated *.Rcheck directory will be deleted if the check was successful (no warnings or errors or notes), which means if you see a *.Rcheck directory, it means the check failed, and you need to take a look at the log files under that directory.

The time to finish the check is recorded for each package. As the check goes on, the total remaing time will be roughly estimated via n * mean(times), where n is the number of packages remaining to be checked, and times is a vector of elapsed time of packages that have been checked.

If a check on a reverse dependency failed, its *.Rcheck directory will be renamed to *.Rcheck2, and another check will be run against the CRAN version of the package. If the logs of the two checks are the same, it means no new problems were introduced in the package, and you can probably ignore this particular reverse dependency. The function compare_Rcheck() can be used to create a summary of all the differences in the check logs under *.Rcheck and *.Rcheck2. This will be done automatically if options(xfun.rev_check.summary = TRUE) has been set.

A recommended workflow is to use a special directory to run rev_check(), set the global options xfun.rev_check.src_dir and repos in the R startup (see ?Startup) profile file .Rprofile under this directory, and (optionally) set R_LIBS_USER in .Renviron to use a special library path (so that your usual library will not be cluttered). Then run xfun::rev_check(pkg) once, investigate and fix the problems or (if you believe it was not your fault) ignore broken packages in the file 00ignore, and run xfun::rev_check(pkg) again to recheck the failed packages. Repeat this process until all *.Rcheck directories are gone.

As an example, I set options(repos = c(CRAN = 'https://cran.rstudio.com'), xfun.rev_check.src_dir = '~/Dropbox/repo') in .Rprofile, and R_LIBS_USER=~/R-tmp in .Renviron. Then I can run, for example, xfun::rev_check('knitr') repeatedly under a special directory ~/Downloads/revcheck. Reverse dependencies and their dependencies will be installed to ~/R-tmp, and knitr will be installed from ~/Dropbox/repo/kintr.

See Also

devtools::revdep_check() is more sophisticated, but currently has a few major issues that affect me: (1) It always deletes the *.Rcheck directories (https://github.com/hadley/devtools/issues/1395), which makes it difficult to know more information about the failures; (2) It does not fully install the source package before checking its reverse dependencies (https://github.com/hadley/devtools/pull/1397); (3) I feel it is fairly difficult to iterate the check (ignore the successful packages and only check the failed packages); by comparison, xfun::rev_check() only requires you to run a short command repeatedly (failed packages are indicated by the existing *.Rcheck directories, and automatically checked again the next time).

xfun::rev_check() borrowed a very nice feature from devtools::revdep_check(): estimating and displaying the remaining time. This is particularly useful for packages with huge numbers of reverse dependencies.