[R-package] CRAN requires a new release by Feb 14th

[jameslamb]

Description

On January 14th, I received the following email from Dr. Brian Ripley (speaking on behalf of CRAN):

GCC 15 has now reached 'stage 4', which typically means it is about a
month from release, so please submit an update before 2025-02-14.

lightgbm is also causing UBSAN issues in package gpboost and has
installation issues on Alpine Linux.

To stay on CRAN, we must put up a new release (at least of the R package) by February 14th.

Notes

Problem 1: "installation issues on Alpine Linux"

details: https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_lightgbm.html

Version: 4.5.0
Check: top-level files
Result: NOTE 
    possible bashism in configure.ac line 63 (should be VAR="${VAR}foo"):
        LGB_CPPFLAGS+=" -DMM_PREFETCH=1"
    possible bashism in configure.ac line 89 (should be VAR="${VAR}foo"):
        LGB_CPPFLAGS+=" -DMM_MALLOC=1"

fixed by: #6746

Problem 2: "GCC 15 has now reached 'stage 4'"

details: https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/gcc15/lightgbm.out)

io/json11.cpp:102:28: note: 'uint8_t' is defined in header '<cstdint>'; this is probably fixable by adding '#include <cstdint>'
io/json11.cpp:103:28: error: 'uint8_t' does not name a type
  103 |                static_cast<uint8_t>(value[i + 1]) == 0x80 &&
      |                            ^~~~~~~

fixed by: #6736

Problem 3: "lightgbm is also causing UBSAN issues in package gpboost"

Not sure what this refers to. I don't see any issues at these places:

• https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_gpboost.html
• https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Afabsig%2FGPBoost%20UBSAN&type=code

@fabsig what does this note from CRAN refer to?

[fabsig]

lightgbm is also causing UBSAN issues in package gpboost and has
installation issues on Alpine Linux.

To my knowledge, this information is wrong. GPBoost has some UBSAN issues, but these are not due to LightGBM.

[jameslamb]

Ok great, thank you for the link and quick response!

[jameslamb]

v4.6.0 is now on CRAN, and the gcc-15 errors are gone!

Leaving this open though, because the jobs with those bashisms issues haven't been re-run, so those still show up at https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_lightgbm.html.

[jameslamb]

The bashisms issue is also now resolved at https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_lightgbm.html

Almost all of the CRAN checks have been run on lightgbm 4.6.0. At this point, the only things noted on that page are the NOTEs about binary size:

Version: 4.6.0
Check: installed package size
Result: NOTE
installed size is 71.7Mb
sub-directories of 1Mb or more:
libs 71.1Mb
Flavors: r-release-macos-x86_64, r-release-windows-x86_64, r-oldrel-macos-x86_64, r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Which are not a problem... they've been there for as long as LightGBM was on CRAN and CRAN treats them as informational-only.

This can now be closed.