Brian J. Knaus

Brian J. Knaus’s blog about genomics and biology.

R 3.4.1 personal library location

R 3.4.1 ‘Single Candle’ was released on June 30, 2017. Our group is preparing to provide an R workshop at our societal meeting this summer, so I’m tryingot keep up to date with the R releases. Installation on my work Ubuntu 16.04 LTS machine appeared to go smoothly. However, upon trying to install packages I received the following error. Warning in install.packages(update[instlib == l, "Package"], l, contriburl = contriburl, : 'lib = "/usr/lib/R/site-library"' is not writable Would you like to use a personal library instead? Read more →

Customizing a Docker image

In previous posts we’ve used Docker images to troubleshoot R package issues. One of the tasks associated with this has been the installation of system and R dependencies. This installation can be somewhat time consuming. In order to avoid this we can customize a container so that it has the dependencies we need. Here we’ll see how this is accomplished. We’ve been using the rocker r-devel-san-clang container. A first step is to fork this repository to your own account. Read more →

Reproducing a clang-UBSAN issue

My R package, vcfR Version 1.5.0, is currently reporting a clang-UBSAN issue. I’ve described how to geet a Docker image with clang-UBSAN up and running here. Once we have the image up and running we’ll want to install package dependencies. First, pandoc is needed to render markdown and qpdf is used to check pdfs. apt-get update apt-get install pandoc qpdf Then we can install R packages. R -e 'install.packages(c("ape", "dplyr", "knitr", "poppr", "Rcpp", "memuse", "pinfsc50", "rmarkdown", "testthat", "tidyr", "vegan", "viridisLite"), dependencies = TRUE, lib = "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library")' Build and test our package. Read more →

Running r-devel-ubsan-clang in Docker

My R package, vcfR Version 1.5.0, currently has an issue with clang-UBSAN. This can be seen at it’s CRAN site and clicking the link for ‘CRAN checks.’ Under the section ‘Additional issues’ it lists ‘clang-UBSAN’. clang is ‘a C language family frontend for LLVM’ that is typically used as the compiler on OSX (Macs) when Xcode is installed. The undefined behavior sanitizer (UBSAN) tests for issues such as memory overflows. Read more →

CRAN memory error

I have a package on CRAN where the CRAN tests are reporting a memory error. In order to use the address sanitizer (ASAN) we need to have a version of R that has been compiled specially to make use of it. In a previous post I described how we can use Docker to run rocker images so we do not have to change our system R. I’ve also validated the ASAN is working. Read more →