[Rcpp-devel] How to manage testing code for Rcpp based project?

[Peng Yu]

Hi Dirk,

> Before you look at RcppArmadillo, look at Rcpp itself:
>
>    - 22 unit test files

Are you referring to these files as test files.

~/Documents/src/Rsrc/cran/Rcpp_0.9.13/inst/unitTests$ ls runit.*.R |wc -l
22

>    - 349 unit test functions

And here is how you get the number 349?

/Documents/src/Rsrc/cran/Rcpp_0.9.13/inst/unitTests$ grep function
runit.*.R|grep '\<test\.' | wc -l
349

>    - 770 unit tests

How do you get the above number?

I don't quite what these directories are for. They seems to be some
packages as well. Would you please help me understand how they are
used for testing?

~/Documents/src/Rsrc/cran/Rcpp_0.9.13/inst/unitTests$ ls -goltrd
RcppTestA/ testRcpp*
drwxr-xr-x 8 272 Jun 28 23:19 testRcppModule
drwxr-xr-x 8 272 Jun 28 23:19 testRcppClass
drwxr-xr-x 7 238 Jun 28 23:19 RcppTestA/


> It is far from perfect. In fact, the CRAN gatekeepers now complain that
> testing takes too long (!!) and have forced us to disable a number of these
> tests so that the testing part takes no longer than about one minute.
>
> R itself has three competing unit test frameworks. We went with RUnit as it
> permits
>
>    - testing when developing (and I have a simple script below)
>
>    - testing via R CMD check, and
>
>    - testing once installed.
>
> We added a solution to have a vignette summarize the tests.

I assume that you mean Rcpp-unitTests.pdf?


How does Rcpp-unitTests.txt get generated automatically during package
build? It looks to me that it has to be manually generated?

~/Documents/src/Rsrc/cran/Rcpp_0.9.13$ ackall Rcpp-unitTests.txt
inst/doc/Rcpp-unitTests.Rnw
25:results <- "unitTests-results/Rcpp-unitTests.txt"

man/RcppUnitTests.Rd
19:txt <- system.file( "doc", "unitTests-results",
"Rcpp-unitTests.txt", package = "Rcpp" )

MD5
67:bee860827a4518d5fc3bbb8cc2cb4897
*inst/doc/unitTests-results/Rcpp-unitTests.txt


> RUnit works, but the setup is not the easiest. If someone has ideas for
> better solutions, by all means implement those.  Unit testing has helped us
> many times, and I consider it to be a very important part of package
> development.

How (or in what aspect) RUnit is better than devtools?

-- 
Regards,
Peng