Fails on CRAN due to setwd() to read-only installation directory

Current errors on CRAN including R-patched (so it's not R-devel) pasted below.
Thanks to Kurt's investigation, it's due to data.table calling setwd() to installation directory to reach test files loaded by fread. But the installation directory is (very reasonably) now mounted read-only on CRAN and a write of the plot in non-interactive mode is failing for the ggplot2 compatibility tests.
To reproduce: install data.table, change install directory to read-only, library(data.table), library(ggplot2), test.data.table() (I didn't yet try that, but in theory that should reproduce it).
One solution is to stop using setwd() to avoid any accidental or superfluous writes there. But then all fread tests loading test files need to be changed somehow, prefixed with the location.

Test 167 Error in (function (file = if (onefile) "Rplots.pdf" else "Rplot%03d.pdf", :
  cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'
Test 167.1 Error in (function (file = if (onefile) "Rplots.pdf" else "Rplot%03d.pdf", : 
  cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'
Test 167.2 Error in (function (file = if (onefile) "Rplots.pdf" else "Rplot%03d.pdf", : 
  cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'
Test 168 Error in (function (file = if (onefile) "Rplots.pdf" else "Rplot%03d.pdf", : 
  cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'
Test 168.1 Error in (function (file = if (onefile) "Rplots.pdf" else "Rplot%03d.pdf", : 
  cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'
   
Running test id 1696 
Error in eval(exprs[i], envir) : 
5 errors out of 5946 (lastID=1751, endian==little, sizeof(long double)==16, sizeof(pointer)==8) in inst/tests/tests.Rraw on Tue Jan 2 07:11:13 2018.
Search tests.Rraw for test numbers: 167, 167.1, 167.2, 168, 168.1.
Calls: test.data.table -> sys.source -> eval -> eval
Execution halted

I think this would be a solution

if ("package:ggplot2" %in% search() && requireNamespace("grDevices", quietly = TRUE)) {
    # Issue #2546: printing plots implicitly writes to a pdf. Unless it's
    # made explicit, it's written to the working directory, which may not
    # be writeable.
    provide_pdf <- function() tempfile(fileext = ".pdf")
    library(grDevices)
    ggplot.pdf <- provide_pdf()
    pdf(ggplot.pdf)

    # ... <ggplot2 tests>

    invisible(dev.off())
    invisible(file.remove(ggplot.pdf))
}

I believe only one call to pdf is required (each plot is put on multiple pages), but doing it for each ggplot test may make debugging easier.

I can add it to my open pull request #2545 (as I've already modified test 167) or I can defer a separate pull request until after that PR is resolved.

Something to keep in mind -- with enough tests adding to the temporary pdf, of course the file size can be an issue. I don't know what the space allocation is on CRAN, and it would probably take hundreds of ggplot-based tests for this to be a concern anyway...

@HughParsonage

@HughParsonage More robust (I'm currently thinking) to not setwd() to the installation directory at all rather than identify and change tests that might be like this ggplot2 one. That's one known so far and there might be more. Is it any plotting (base too) that is writing to a plot file in current directory, then, when run from R CMD check? I didn't know it did that. Anyway, PR attempted ...

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Fails on CRAN due to setwd() to read-only installation directory #2546

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Fails on CRAN due to setwd() to read-only installation directory #2546

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HughParsonage commented on Jan 8, 2018

MichaelChirico commented on Jan 8, 2018

mattdowle commented on Jan 11, 2018

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