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I am building a new R package on an iMac w/ Catalina. I have installed the latest XCode and XQuartz. My new package builds fine, i.e. 

R CMD BUILD conicFit

runs without error. Then I tried 

R CMD CHECK  --as-cran conicFit

and get this error: 

* using log directory ‘/Users/cgw/Rgames/fitConic.Rcheck’
* using R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24)
* using platform: x86_64-apple-darwin17.0 (64-bit)
* using session charset: UTF-8
* using option ‘--as-cran’
* checking for file ‘fitConic/DESCRIPTION’ ... OK
* this is package ‘fitConic’ version ‘1.0’
* checking CRAN incoming feasibility ...Error:  file './DESCRIPTION' does not exist
Execution halted

If I run without the --as-cran flag, the check passes with no errors or warnings. What's even more frustrating is that I can re-run older packages and do not get this error, which suggests that the actual error is something other than not finding "./DESCRIPTION" .

Any ideas as what to test, or what to reinstall, etc.?

Carl Witthoft
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  • Why should we assume that you are not missing a DESCRIPTION file? More expansively, this sort of problem is more likely to be addressed constructively with a link to the package code on Github, so people do not need to do the "20 questions" sort of game to narrow down the possible sources of error. – IRTFM Jun 06 '20 at 01:20
  • @IRTFM Well for one thing, there's that line "**checking for file 'fitConic/DESCRIPTION' ok**" – Carl Witthoft Jun 06 '20 at 11:43

1 Answers1

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It appears that a subtle change in the way R CMD CHECK works under R 4.X caused commands that previously worked to fail. The solution is to specify the tarball, i.e.

R CMD CHECK --as-cran fitConic.tar.gz

runs the detailed code check to completion.

Carl Witthoft
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    No, that has been _the_ recommendation for many many years how. As in "likely close to a decade". Not an R 4.0.0 change. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Jun 07 '20 at 19:41
  • @DirkEddelbuettel That's true. What I meant is that, prior to my upgrading to 4.0, I could run `--as-cran` checks on the source files. That no longer works. – Carl Witthoft Jun 08 '20 at 15:19