Non-portable flags used for compilation

[samuel-rosa]

I get the following on Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS, R-release, GCC:

* checking compilation flags used ... WARNING
Compilation used the following non-portable flag(s):
  ‘-Wdate-time’ ‘-Werror=format-security’ ‘-Wformat’

See the full build log at https://builder.r-hub.io/status/spsann_2.2.0.tar.gz-268f9200dc964f988a305582ce2bf429

I know that this can be solved locally by setting alternative flags in the ~/.R/Makevars file. How can I solve this issue when using rhub?

[akashrajkn]

I have the same issue as well.

[gaborcsardi]

The Ubuntu build of R has those flags, by default, I think. So unless you specified these flags yourself, and/or you are seeing them for other platforms that CRAN uses, e.g. R-devel on Debian, you can ignore them.

[rikardn]

First: sorry for posting to a closed issue.

These flags are set in the /etc/R/Makeconf in Ubuntu, but strangely not in Debian. Do you think I should file an issue to Ubuntu or could you consider fixing this for the rhub Ubuntu machine? (I am having the same issue on my machine with Ubuntu 18.10) Perhaps we can save others from scratching their heads on this WARNING.

[gaborcsardi]

We could "fix" this in the Dockerfile, but I am just not sure if that's the right thing to do. This is a builder that is for Ubuntu, so I guess you would want to keep the default Ubuntu settings?

The maintainer knows about this, btw.: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2019q2/003898.html

[rikardn]

You are right, it makes sense to leave it as it is in the Dockerfile. Also because it might be fixed in future Ubuntu versions. Thanks for the informative link!

[gaborcsardi]

Actually, this is not so much a bug in Ubuntu, but a bug in the R check code. Yes, these flags are not portable, but they are not coming from the package, they are coming from the system setup, so in this case it does not actually matter if they are portable or not.

[gaborcsardi]

I'll report it as a bug.