Hi,
Porting this discussion about the future R 4.0 toolchain on GitHub Actions
(GHA) to the mailing list.
GHA will be the new standard regarding CI for the R community in the
foreseeable future since the tidyverse is moving there with full power and the
community usually follows.
Even leaving the tidyverse out, Jim (in cc since I don’t know if he is in the
list) maintains the installers for R which will be used by everyone, even if
one deviates from the general tidyverse templates (like {tic} does).
The discussion is about whether these installers try to mimic the CRAN
toolchain (system clang and SDK 10.13 (?)) or go a different way.
There are many options as we have seen in prior discussions about the compilers
on this mailing list. However, most are restricted by the fact that there is
only Catalina (10.15) available as the base system for the runners. While the
tidyverse wants to use binaries mainly, the toolchain installed should also be
able to have a robust source installation behavior: One might want to test on
R-devel for which there are no binaries - or test in general if source
installations works.
Now if the GHA toolchain deviates from CRAN one might get different results
when testing on GHA and when uploading to CRAN. This might cause confusion.
Installing custom compilers and linking such in .R/Makevars is tedious to set
up and requires download time and bandwidth for each run.
So we should think in detail about how to proceed here and also how to
communicate the setup to the users.
Users do not browse the source code by default and check with compilers are
used, which CFLAGS are set and so on. They just “hope” that they can trust the
setup and that things “will just work”, on the CI and on CRAN then.
For whatever will be decided in the end: I wish that the reasons for the final
setup are communicated top-level.
Let’s discuss this here as a community: Simon as the one responsible for the
CRAN toolchain and Jim who implements the R installer for GHA. It would be
great if we could find a consensus for R 4.0 that everyone agrees on rather
than being sad afterwards that no-one can do anything about how things are (and
how others have chosen their toolchain).
The possibility for change is there now due to the major version bump and we
should take advantage of it.
Best, Patrick
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