[R-package] R CMD CHECK note 'partial argument match'

[jameslamb]

Moving this discussion from #3611 (comment).

R CMD CHECK on the R package currently produces the following note:

checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
partial argument match of 'data' to 'dataset'
lgb.cv : : warning in getinfo(data = data, name =
"init_score"): partial argument match of 'data' to 'dataset'
lgb.cv : : warning in getinfo(data = data, name = "weight"):

What this NOTE means and how to fix it

R supports partial argument matching. If the name of a keyword argument is close to an actual keyword argument, R will allow it.

f <- function(data = 5){return(data + 1)}

f(dat = 11)
# [1] 12

These getinfo() keyword arguments were introduced in the work to close #3390 . The immediate fix for them is to just change those uses to dataset =

Why wasn't this caught by CI?

When testing the R package today, R CMD CHECK produces few NOTEs that we know we can safely ignore because they aren't relevant to CRAN.

• "installed package size..."
• "maintainer is..."

The mechanism we use for this is to allow a maximum number of NOTEs in CI

• LightGBM/.ci/test_r_package.sh

  Line 189 in 2c958dd

  ALLOWED_CHECK_NOTES=2

• LightGBM/.ci/test_r_package_windows.ps1

  Line 171 in 2c958dd

  $ALLOWED_CHECK_NOTES = 2

When the R package was successfully released to CRAN in version 3.1.0, the "maintainer is..." NOTE was no longer thrown. Because we didn't notice this and didn't change the ALLOWED_CHECK_NOTES threshold in CI, this "partial argument match" was note caught by CI on #3617

How to close this issue

Open a PR with the following changes

• fix getinfo(data = ... calls to get_info(dataset = ...
• change the CI scripts for the R package to not allow ANY notes, and ignore specific ones using the environment variables available for configuring R CMD CHECK: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-ints.html#Tools

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity since it was closed. To start a new related discussion, open a new issue at https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/issues including a reference to this.