Native R on Travis takes longer than the script

[robertzk]

On my packages, building using the new native R support takes 3-4x as long as using the old method. Is it possible to incorporate a .travis.yml flag to install just base R to speed up this time?

[eddelbuettel]

Same here on a first test with one of the the most minimal CRAN packages I have. I had tuned my .travis.yml carefully to be as lightweight as possible; the way things stand right now the new default seems useful for newbs but I guess I will cook my own (making things like texlive, pandoc, automated addition of two apt-get repos etc pp all optional).

So now that r-travis has proved the concept, maybe time to move on and fork into something simpler, lighter, faster. Or really urge them to get on with it with prebuilt images.

[eddelbuettel]

In a nutshell, what happened was:

• while we all worked on r-travis, we made sure certain "API" access points were optional
• now latex, devtools, ... are forced in unconditionally

and in sum everything seems to take several minutes minutes longer.

[craigcitro]

yes, this is by design: we unconditionally install latex and pandoc, and no longer set the R CMD check options to skip vignettes.

but don't worry, this is all part of a plan: now that we're merged into travis, we're looking at getting ourselves a base image with all of these bits pre-installed. then we'll have fast builds with all the various tools available.

and if you're wondering why i didn't leave it all optional to start: i didn't want to introduce a whole collection of configuration options that were slated to go away from the start, making deprecating them later potentially more complicated.

[craigcitro]

(i'm going to leave this open for other folks who come looking.)

[ehrlinger]

My package compiles a vignette with LaTeX, but still fails on Travis because of missing latex packages. Is there an option to either install the missing xcolor or booktabs packages in LaTeX? Or alternatively, skip the vignettes?

[eddelbuettel]

Sure:

• I have been skipping vignette builds since the start as it takes so long to set it up
• If you want to build with vignettes and need extra packages, use the apt-get hook to install those.

[ehrlinger]

Got it working again... with:

apt_packages:
  - texlive-full

May have been brute force, but it succeeds. Of course, it also makes Travis run LONGER, but it's all automated anyway.