add ability to skip_on M1 Mac?

[cboettig]

As you know, CRAN is beginning to enforce checks on M1 Macs, sending the usual "Please correct to safely retain" emails when tests fail. Like Solaris, some of these failures can occur when an upstream dependency installs on the platform but does not actually run. (Obviously doing skip_on("mac") would be a bit overkill). Not sure how to detect architecture though. Thanks for considering or any other suggestions on how to approach this.

[gaborcsardi]

AFAICT this is how to detect it. The OS:

❯ Sys.info()[["sysname"]]
[1] "Darwin"

and the arch:

> R.version$arch
[1] "aarch64"

[hadley]

I'm happy to implement this but I'm stuck on what to call it.

[gaborcsardi]

How about we add an arch argument to skip_on_os()?

[hadley]

What are the other possible architectures apart from x86_64 and aarch64?

[gaborcsardi]

There are others, like s390x, ppc64el, other arms, etc. Maybe just let the user specify whatever, and match it to R.version$arch?

[hadley]

IMO part of the benefit of skip_on_os() is that you can (e.g.) specify "mac" and it figures out that you need "darwin". I'd like to keep something similar for arch.

[hadley]

But maybe I can just put them in the documentation..

[gaborcsardi]

I think that is fine as well. Then you could have intel and m1 for mac only, and nothing else.

People can always skip on other arches with if (R.version$arch == ...) skip(...)...

[gaborcsardi]

Or you could have some aliases, and fall back to compare to the exact value.