List of check's origin

[maelle]

It'd be useful for package design to know where each check comes from: is it from goodpractice or not for instance.

[maelle]

Also include whether a check needs the namespace to be loaded.

[mpadge]

I agree with this one, and suggest we need a mechanism like ropensci-review-tools/goodpractice#152 for 'pkgcheck' checks. I'll self-assign and get it going 🚆

[mpadge]

@maelle and anyone else who may read this Request for some design guidance before we tackle this one, please 🙏 . goodpractice checks are all called with an initial description parameter specified and passed at the point at which each check is called (see examples in https://github.com/ropensci-review-tools/goodpractice/blob/main/R/chk_rcmdcheck.R). Checks here can't be called like that (among other reasons, because they are automatically collated and called from function prefixes, whereas goodpractice explicitly calls each defined check). So we need a different mechanism...

We also can't use any sneaky roxygen2 tags, because those are source code artifacts only, and don't exist in installed versions of any package. That's a shame, because it would have been a cool mechanism!

So my current suggestion is to re-design the output_pkgchk_<check>_<name>() functions to include an additional "source" list item describing this (and possibly a "description" item analogous to goodpractice too). That would work, with the only required re-design that all output_pkgchk_<check>_<name>(checks) definitions would have to be updated to output_pkgchk_<check>_<name>(checks = NULL) to allow them to be called with no argument just to grab the "source" and/or "description" information. As always, see example in https://github.com/ropensci-review-tools/pkgcheck/blob/main/R/check-has-citation.R to help ponder this. My suggestion would just replace,

pkgcheck/R/check-has-citation.R

Lines 22 to 26 in 887dc4a

	out <- list (
	check_pass = checks$checks$has_citation,
	summary = "",
	print = ""
	)

with

    out <- list (
        check_pass = checks$checks$has_citation,
        summary = "",
        print = "",
        description = "Check whether a package has a `inst/CITATION` file.",
        source = "File structure of local repository"
    )

Can you think of any more clever ways?

[maelle]

Do we need some objects? 🤔

[mpadge]

Do we need some objects? 🤔

Could you please explain a bit what you mean by that?

[maelle]

I was wondering whether using objects, instead of just functions, would simplify the design somehow.

[mpadge]

What kind of objects though? goodpractice defines checks as simple list items, but I think current function design is better here. We could use S7 objects, but that would likely be confusing for newcomers here. Other suggestions for what kind of objects?

[maelle]

No, it was really just a random idea.