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verdepcheck

Have you ever encounter following errors?

Error: object ‘foo’ is not exported by 'namespace:bar'
`foo()` was deprecated in bar 1.0.0.
i Please use `baz()` instead.

This package is a tool for package developers to check your package using various versions of dependencies. It will help you detect new breaking changes of dependencies as well as the minimal version supported.

Overview

Typical workflow includes the following:

  • read local package dependencies from the DESCRIPTION file using dedicated Config/Needs/verdepcheck field
  • derive dependencies version from Imports and Suggests according to the strategy used
  • resolve and identify potential conflicts of dependencies
  • download and install to the temporary directory
  • execute R CMD CHECK using directory from the previous step as a library path

Supported strategies are:

  • max - use the greatest version of dependent packages. Please note that using development version is not guaranteed to be stable.
  • release - use the released version of dependent packages. It will try use CRAN if possible else if GitHub release is available then use it else fail.
  • min_cohort - find maximum date of directly dependent packages release dates and use that as PPM snapshot date for dependency resolve.
  • min_isolated - for each direct dependency: find its release date and use it as PPM snapshot for resolving itself. Next, combine all the individual resolutions and resolve it altogether again.

The main functions are:

  • new_<strategy>_deps_installation_proposal for creating installation_proposal objects
  • <strategy>_deps_check that creates and executes installation_proposal and then run "R CMD CHECK"

This package is heavily based on pkgdepends for dependency resolution and rcmdcheck for executing "R CMD CHECK".

Install 

devtools::install_github("insightsengineering/verdepcheck")

Usage

The main goal of package authors is to use it within GitHub Action or any other CI tool. See r-verdepcheck-action.

x <- max_deps_check("(path to your package)")

# print results for debugging
x$ip$show_solution()
x$ip$draw()

# create artifact
x$ip$create_lockfile("/path/to/pkg.lock")

# print R CMD CHECK results
x$check$session_info
x$check$status