Dear Dario,
this question may be more suitable for R-pkg-devel or perhaps R-help
list, if you have subsequent questions, you might get better advice
there. In short, save() does no automated selection of a compression
algorithm - it just uses the one specified, by default "gzip". For
automated selection, please use resaveRdaFiles(). You can also use
"--resave-data" when building your package (see "Building package
tarballs" in R-exts) for this to be done automatically for all your data
files. Finally, "R CMD check --as-cran" will report when it can find a
significantly better compression (note that CRAN policies ask for
--as-cran check being run locally before submitting a package, anyway).
The CRAN repository policy mentions that packages should be of minimum
necessary size and the checks are in line with that (and there are
already heuristics in place to avoid the warning if possible gains are
small). I don't think in principle things could be made any simpler than
they are now: "R CMD check --as-cran" will report a possible improvement
by resave, "R CMD build --resave-data" will do the resave. Note that the
detection of the best compression algorithm cannot be done without
actually compressing the data using different algorithms, which is what
resaveRdaFiles() does -- doing this in save() by default is not possible
due to the performance overhead.
Best
Tomas
On 06/18/2018 10:00 AM, Dario Strbenac wrote:
Good day,
Save sometimes chooses a compression method which causes a warning during
package checking. An example of this is:
measurements <- matrix(round(rnorm(2000*190), 2), nrow = 2000, ncol = 190)
classes <- factor(sample(LETTERS[1:2], 190, replace = TRUE))
save(measurements, classes, file = "data/experiment.RData")
then, when the package is checked,
* checking data for ASCII and uncompressed saves ... WARNING
Note: significantly better compression could be obtained
by using R CMD build --resave-data
old_size new_size compress
experiment.RData 689Kb 447Kb bzip2
Could save and R CMD check consistently agree on a suitable compression scheme?
Could R CMD check not emit warnings if the data is already small and the
alternative compression doesn't reduce the size much, such as for this example?
Perhaps it could only emit warnings when the data file is more than 5 MB and
the alternative scheme's resulting file is 50% or more than the size of the
existing file. There is also no explanation in Section 1.1.6 Data in Packages
of Writing R Extensions that compression of data files is implicitly mandatory
for R packages to pass the checking process these days.
--------------------------------------
Dario Strbenac
University of Sydney
Camperdown NSW 2050
Australia
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