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RConsortium / wishlist

A wishlist of idea from the ISC and community
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Running R on platforms you don't have #11

Open jennybc opened 7 years ago

jennybc commented 7 years ago

r-hub and various CI solutions are great for checking whether a package works on multiple platforms. But once you learn that it doesn't or you get a bug report ... it can be quite frustrating to get to the bottom of it and resolve. You really need access to a running instance of that OS, with R and all the necessary packages installed, at versions you control.

I know there are great solutions to parts of this problem, such as rocker for Debian. It's less clear how the typical Windows- or Mac-based R developer should go about setting up a virtual environment for the OS which they don't have.

Could the community develop and maintain up-to-date, battle-tested instructions or images?

gaborcsardi commented 7 years ago

There is sg similar in the plans for r-hub: there is no reason why R-hub cannot run arbitrary R code instead of R CMD check.

The key thing for usability is that we need to ensure a very fast startup and response time. Batch package checks are OK to take a couple of minutes, but this R "runner" would have start quickly and/or give you an R session. Anyway, these are implementation details.

jennybc commented 7 years ago

Awesome! Please consider this a 👍 for that feature of r-hub. An actual R session would be so much better than "try something, commit, push, cross fingers, read the autopsy, repeat".

hturner commented 7 years ago

This would be great, I had an issue on Mac recently and ended up asking friends to run checks on my package - not ideal, especially as these were remote friends, so slow turnaround!