[Rd] issue with latest release of R-devel

[Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D.]

I'm getting ready to submit an update of survival, and is my habit I run the checks on all 
packages that depend/import/suggest  survival.  I am getting some very odd behaviour wrt 
non-reproducability.  It came to a head when some things failed on one machine and worked 
on another.   I found that the difference was that the failure was using the 3/27 release 
and the success was still on a late Jan release.   When I updated R on the latter machine 
it now fails too.

An example is the test cases in genfrail.Rd, in the frailtySurv package.   (The package 
depends on survival, but I'm fairly sure that this function does not.)   It's a fairly 
simple function to generate test data sets, with a half dozen calls in the test file.  If 
you cut and paste the whole batch into an R session, the last one of them fails.  But if 
you run that call by itself it works.   This yes/no behavior is reproducable.

Another puzzler was the ranger package.  In the tests/testthat directory,  
source('test_maxstat') fails if it is preceeded by source('test_jackknife'), but not 
otherwise.  Again, I don't think the survival package is implicated in either of these tests.

Another package that succeeded under the older r-devel and now fails is arsenal, but I 
haven't looked deeply at that.

Any insight would be be appreciated.

Terry T.
----


Here is the sessionInfo() for one of the machines.  The other is running xubuntu 18 LTS.  
(It's at the office, and I can send that tomorrow when I get in.)

R Under development (unstable) (2019-03-28 r76277)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/local/src/R-devel/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: /usr/local/src/R-devel/lib/libRlapack.so

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=C
  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.0


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]