Tools to run a reverse dependency check similar to CRAN.
To use this on GitHub Actions you can simply call the reusable workflow. To do this, create a new workflow in your package git repo named .github/workflows/recheck.yml which contains the following:
on:
workflow_dispatch:
inputs:
which:
type: choice
description: Which dependents to check
options:
- strong
- most
name: Reverse dependency check
jobs:
revdep_check:
name: Reverse check ${{ inputs.which }} dependents
uses: r-devel/recheck/.github/workflows/recheck.yml@v1
with:
which: ${{ inputs.which }}Then trigger it manually using the 'run workflow' button under the actions tab. Note that you can pick a branch to test, so you can perform reverse dependency checks on a feature branch before merging into main.
A summary of the results can be seen in the GHA webUI. Upon completion, the full install/check logs for all packages are available in the 'artifacts' section.
A reverse dependency check can be a useful diagnostic tool to identify potential regressions that may need further investigation. However it is often impractical to use as a red/green CI test: checks from other packages that depend on yours can be influenced by all sorts of factors specific to the platform, hardware, network, system setup, or just random failures.
The goal of this repo is to provide a simple tool that can run on free infrastructure to discover potential problems with reverse dependencies of your package. However it is still up to you to interpret the results, and possibly investigate them to identify problems. We try to create a setup similar to CRAN, but we need to make trade offs to keep this practical (see below).
To be able check reverse dependencies, we first need to install all dependencies (including Suggests) for each of those packages. Many CRAN packages indirectly depend on 100+ other packages, so this quickly adds up.
Hence even if your package only has a handful of dependents, you may need to install over a thousand other packages, before even starting the revdep check. For this reason it is only practical to do this on a platforms for which precompiled R binary packages are available.
CRAN runs revdep checks on r-devel on a server with debian:testing but there are currently no R binary packages available for this platform. Instead our containers are based on ubuntu:latest and run r-release, for which public binary packages are available via https://p3m.dev and https://r-universe.dev. This is one reason results might be slighlty different from what CRAN would show, though in practice it is usually irrelevant.
On GitHub actions we run the check inside the rcheckserver container. This container has the same system libraries installed as the CRAN Debian server.