[R-pkg-team] Bug#1072630: Help needed on providing the en_US locale in autopkgtests

[Charles Plessy]

Hello,

we have a package, r-cran-dplyr, that runs the upstream test suite as
part of its autopkgtests.  Unfortunately it fails when it tries to set
the en_US locale to test support of non-UTF locales; maybe it is not
available in the default environment of debci?  Do people know a way to
make en_US available in that context?

https://ci.debian.net/packages/r/r-cran-dplyr/unstable/amd64/53464906/

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1072630

More details follow.

On line 325 of the package's `tests/testthat/test-arrange.R` there is:

    skip_if_not(has_collate_locale("en_US"), message = "Can't use 'en_US' locale")

This leads to the emission of the warning "Can't use 'en_US' locale",
which causes autopkgtest to fail.

I am aware of two possible solutions that I would like to avoid:

 1) Patch the test suite so that it does not run that test.
 2) Allow autopkgtest to ignore warnings.

Both of them equate to put dust in the corner and run only the tests
that are the least likely to fail, which puts into question why we would
run upstream tests at all.

So if you know a good way to enable debci to provide the needed locale
to debci, please let me know.

Have a nice day,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy                         Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian R packaging team         https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/r-pkg-team
Tooting from home                  https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
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