[Rd] Routine and Deep testing with R CMD check

[Bill Dunlap]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2008, Kevin R. Coombes wrote:

> [1] Because of the need for a nightly build of BioConductor, the tests
> (in the ./tests directory) of a package that run routinely as part of "R
> CMD check" must complete in five minutes.
> [2] Nontrivial regression testing of complex algorithms on real data can
> easily take longer than five minutes.
> [3] Maintaining and improving code that works on various kinds of
> "omics" data is greatly facilitated by the inclusion of nontrivial
> regression tests.
>
> Of course, points [1] and [3] are incompatible in the current setup.
> Both could, however, be accommodated by changing the way "R CMD check"
> runs test scripts. There are at least two ways this could be accomplished.

Another approach is to have check use the new-to-2.8.0 function
setSessionTimeLimit() to let the checker put a time limit on
the tests.  In a time-constrained environment you could ask check
to spend no more than 5 minutes running the tests but you could
also set the limit to 3 hours or Inf or anything else.

This would only be useful if the quicker tests were done first,
so you'd have to alphabetize your test files.

It might be nice if check could print the time it took to do
each test.

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Bill Dunlap
Insightful Corporation
bill at insightful dot com

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