[R] To run or not to run examples, CTFS package

Pamela Hall phall at alum.mit.edu
Tue Jun 15 19:45:08 CEST 2004


Hi again;

I have placed many examples in the CTFS Rd pages because my audience really really likes lots of examples in order to understand the options available in a functions.  At this time I have set them all to \dontrun{}.  

however, this isn't because the example command line with its function and options won't work, but rather that CTFS specific datasets must exist to have the function output mean anything (random number generation is not useful for understanding the function output).  The CTFS datasets are quite large...20-40 MB and for some functions many other datasets need to be available.   The functions can also take quite a bit of time to run in some cases, performing many simulations.

So, my questions are:

1.  Does the R CMD check command actually run all of the examples if \dontrun{} isn't in the Rd file?  And won't this take a lot of time with real datasets?

2.  Should I consider making short versions of the datasets for the use of \example{} ?  This is trivial in some cases, but not in others as the function only makes sense on the entire dataset.  however, in those cases it is, so far, with some of the shorter datasets.

3.  Or can I just leave everything as \dontrun{} and if my audience want to actually run a function, then can cut and paste the line out of the man page or just type it in with their versions of the correct datasets attached?

-ph




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