The mac builder (https://mac.r-project.org/macbuilder/submit.html) can be
used as a testing ground before submitting packages to CRAN. It has “the
same setup” as the M1Mac test station on CRAN. My package
anticlust has produced a segfault on M1Mac on CRAN and
therefore I was keen to be able to reproduce the issue on a test station
for the purpose of debugging. Unfortunately, it seems that the Mac
builder does not have “the same setup” (see here
maybe) as the M1Mac test station on CRAN, given that the segfault could
not be reproduced.
Using the Mac builder with the release version of R is quite straight
forward. You can just submit your package as the tar ball that is
generated via R CMD build. However, the M1mac on CRAN runs
a development version of R (“R unstable”) and we have to select the
development version to obtain a more realistic test of the CRAN
settings. The bad news is that is is very likely impossible for the vast
majority of R packages.
The dependencies of the to-be-tested package need to be submitted
manually by the user because there are no packages for R unstable on
CRAN that can be accessed instead (unlike for the win builder, it seems).
Because the package dependencies need to be installed and tested on the
Mac builder themselves, we are also required to upload their
dependencies, and so on—even all the “suggested” dependencies
recursively. This leaves us with more than 1500 dependencies of
testthat alone, which is used by many packages for unit
tests:
imports <- tools::package_dependencies("testthat", recursive = TRUE)
suggests <- tools::package_dependencies("testthat", recursive = TRUE, which = "Suggests")
length(unlist(imports)) + length(unlist(suggests))## [1] 1563Uploading all of these packages exceeds the allowed data limit and is therefore impossible.
anticlust has few dependencies, I thought, but some of
the suggested dependencies are heavy. anticlust also used
testthat, so I switched to tinytest,
which has 0 dependencies, so I was able to please the Mac builder (I
also think in general this was a good switch and I keep
tinytest from now on). For vignette building,
anticlust also has suggested dependencies on
knitr and rmarkdown, which themselves have a
lot of additional dependencies. So I generated a version of anticlust
without vignettes for testing, which is quite straight forward – I just
removed knitr and rmarkdown (and also
palmergenguins, which is only used in a vignette) from the
DESCRIPTION and removed the “vignettes” directory. In total, this only
left anticlust plus an additional 5 packages that had to be
uploaded. Well, at least after I generated a version of
RANN that excludes the testthat dependency (by
removing testthat from the DESCRIPTION and the “tests”
directory).
Unfortunately, the Mac builder still did not reproduce the CRAN issue. But well, it is at least one way to test your package on a Mac before CRAN submission if you—as I—do not have a Mac.
Last updated: 2024-05-03