[Rd] Control statements with condition with greater than one should give error (not just warning) [PATCH]

[Karl Millar]

Is there anything that actually requires R core members to manually do
significant amounts of work here?

IIUC, you can do a CRAN run to detect the broken packages, and a simple
script can collect the emails of the affected maintainers, so you can send
a single email to them all.  If authors don't respond by fixing their
packages, then those packages should be archived, since there's high
probability of those packages being buggy anyway.

If you expect a non-trivial amount of questions regarding this change from
the affected package maintainers, then you can create a FAQ page for it,
which you can fill in as questions arrive, so you don't get too many
duplicated questions.

Karl

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 4:51 AM, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
wrote:

> >>>>> Michael Lawrence <lawrence.michael at gene.com>
> >>>>>     on Sat, 4 Mar 2017 12:20:45 -0800 writes:
>
>     > Is there really a need for these complications? Packages
>     > emitting this warning are broken by definition and should be fixed.
>
> I agree and probably Henrik, too.
>
> (Others may disagree to some extent .. and find it convenient
>  that R does translate 'if(x)'  to  'if(x[1])'  for them albeit
>  with a warning .. )
>
>     > Perhaps we could "flip the switch" in a test
>     > environment and see how much havoc is wreaked and whether
>     > authors are sufficiently responsive?
>
>     > Michael
>
> As we have > 10'000 packages on CRAN alonce,  and people have
> started (mis)using suppressWarnings(.) in many places,  there
> may be considerably more packages affected than we optimistically assume...
>
> As R core member who would  "flip the switch"  I'd typically then
> have to be the one sending an e-mail to all package maintainers
> affected.... and in this case I'm very reluctant to volunteer
> for that and so, I'd prefer the environment variable where R
> core and others can decide how to use it .. for a while .. until
> the flip is switched for all.
>
> or have I overlooked an issue?
>
> Martin
>
>     > On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Martin Maechler
>     > <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
>     >> wrote:
>
>     >> >>>>> Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson at gmail.com> >>>>>
>     >> on Fri, 3 Mar 2017 10:10:53 -0800 writes:
>     >>
>     >> > On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 9:55 AM, Hadley Wickham >
>     >> <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote: >>> But, how you propose a
>     >> warning-to-error transition >>> should be made without
>     >> wreaking havoc?  Just flip the >>> switch in R-devel and
>     >> see CRAN and Bioconductor packages >>> break overnight?
>     >> Particularly Bioconductor devel might >>> become
>     >> non-functional (since at times it requires >>> R-devel).
>     >> For my own code / packages, I would be able >>> to handle
>     >> such a change, but I'm completely out of >>> control if
>     >> one of the package I'm depending on does not >>> provide
>     >> a quick fix (with the only option to remove >>> package
>     >> tests for those dependencies).
>     >> >>
>     >> >> Generally, a package can not be on CRAN if it has any
>     >> >> warnings, so I don't think this change would have any
>     >> >> impact on CRAN packages.  Isn't this also true for >>
>     >> bioconductor?
>     >>
>     >> > Having a tests/warn.R file with:
>     >>
>     >> > warning("boom")
>     >>
>     >> > passes through R CMD check --as-cran unnoticed.
>     >>
>     >> Yes, indeed.. you are right Henrik that many/most R
>     >> warning()s would not produce R CMD check 'WARNING's ..
>     >>
>     >> I think Hadley and I fell into the same mental pit of
>     >> concluding that such warning()s from
>     >> if(<length-larger-one>) ...  would not currently happen
>     >> in CRAN / Bioc packages and hence turning them to errors
>     >> would not have a direct effect.
>     >>
>     >> With your 2nd e-mail of saying that you'd propose such an
>     >> option only for a few releases of R you've indeed
>     >> clarified your intent to me.  OTOH, I would prefer using
>     >> an environment variable (as you've proposed as an
>     >> alternative) which is turned "active" at the beginning
>     >> only manually or for the "CRAN incoming" checks of the
>     >> CRAN team (and bioconductor submission checks?)  and
>     >> later for '--as-cran' etc until it eventually becomes the
>     >> unconditional behavior of R (and the env.variable is no
>     >> longer used).
>     >>
>     >> Martin
>     >>
>     >> ______________________________________________
>     >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>     >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>     >>
>
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