[Rd] R CMD check for the R code from vignettes

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 03/06/2014, 4:38 AM, Yihui Xie wrote:
> Well, there is still misunderstanding: there is nothing that really
> stops you from tangling the vignettes, and I do not disagree that
> tangle can be useful in certain cases. I'm talking about whether
> package authors _must_ tangle all their vignettes,

Yes, there is a misunderstanding.  You don't need to manually tangle all 
your vignettes, R will do it for you.


  or leave some to
> users to run Stangle() or knitr::purl() on the vignettes if they
> really want the potentially broken R script.

If the script is broken, the vignette is broken.  The package author 
should fix it.

  The prerequisite of this
> question is that the current tangle functions ignore inline
> expressions, and it is not totally clear whether this is good or bad.

It may not be clear whether it was a good design decision, but it is the 
Sweave design.  Nowadays there's nothing stopping you from writing a 
non-Sweave driver that doesn't ignore them.
>
> The harm that you mentioned was not from disabling tangle, but from
> the tangle function, or if you insist the current tangle function
> should be what we expect, then the harm came from the improper use of
> inline expressions.

The latter.
>
> I do not think it is trivial to improve the tangle function so that it
> can generate an R script that fully reproduce what was done in weave.

Now you are being nitpicky.

Duncan Murdoch


> Inline expressions are not the only thing that need improvement. If
> you argue for reproducible research, I can open the Pandora's box to
> make tangle even less desirable and further away from reproducible
> research. For example, how about reproducing graphics using the
> tangled R script? (How do you make tangle use the same graphical
> device(s) as weave? How do you pass the chunk options
> width/height/fig/prefix.string to tangle?) How about chunk hook
> functions in getOption('SweaveHooks')? (What if they have significant
> side effects such as clearing up the workspace as documented in
> help(RweaveLatex)? How to reproduce these side effects in the tangled
> R script?) These open-ended questions apply to both Sweave and knitr.
> As the author of knitr, I feel it is very difficult to answer them.
> Instead of patching tangle functions with uncertainty, personally I'd
> like to stay primarily in the weave world (I admit I'm lazy and lack
> confidence).
>
> I work like Kevin Coombes in the sense that the number of times I
> invoke weave is orders of magnitude greater than tangle. If you
> produced a report using weave, I do not think you should expect other
> people to reproduce the computation using the tangled code.
>
> My conclusion: Is tangle useful? Yes. Must we tangle package
> vignettes? Perhaps no.
>
> Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
> Web: http://yihui.name
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 03/06/2014, 12:58 AM, Yihui Xie wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, I completely agree the tangle code should run without errors, if
>>> the package author has provided such a script. However, I think it is
>>> also the package author's right to choose not to provide such a
>>> script, for reasons that I stated in the beginning (1. redundancy; 2.
>>> tangle functions ignore inline expressions that should not be
>>> ignored).
>>>
>>> It seems that I still need to clarify it: I'm not talking about
>>> disabling _running_ the tangled code, but disabling _generating_ the
>>> code _optionally_. Unless someone is arguing that the tangled code
>>> _must_ be generated from vignettes, I do not think anybody in this
>>> discussion really has a conflict with anybody else.
>>
>>
>> I think that it's not a vignette if you can't tangle it.  Including \Sexpr
>> expressions in the tangled code is the sort of option I would support much
>> more than suppressing the ability to tangle.  (I don't think \Sexpr
>> expressions should be included by default, but there's enough flexibility in
>> the system that it shouldn't be hard to include them optionally.)
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Please also note that I do not expect R core or CRAN maintainers to do
>>> any extra work: package authors can easily disable tangle by
>>> themselves without anything special flags to R CMD build or R CMD
>>> check. The vignettes are still built normally (in terms of "weave"). I
>>> brought forward the discussion to hear the possible harm that I was
>>> potentially not aware of when we disable tangle for R package
>>> vignettes (e.g. does it affect the quality of the package?). So far I
>>> have not heard real harm (I admit my judgment is subjective).
>>
>>
>> Several of us have told you the real harm:  it means that users can't easily
>> extract a script that replicates the computations done in the vignette.
>> That's a useful thing to be able to do.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch