[R-package] [ci] Add a CI job testing the R package with rchk

[jameslamb]

Summary

A continuous integration (CI) job should be added which tests the R package with rchk.

From that project's description,

This project consists of several bug-finding tools that look for memory protection errors in C source code using R API, that is in the source code of R itself and packages. The tools perform whole-program static analysis on LLVM bitcode and run on Linux.

Motivation

rchk can automatically find issues in C/C++ code used in an R package. Adding a CI job in this repository which runs rchk should provide higher confidence in releases and aid maintainers in catching user-facing issues before they make it into releases.

For example, I found that rchk run on the most recent CRAN release (3.2.1) would have caught the bug that led to #4045 (fixed in #4155).

ERROR: initialization function R_init_lightgbm(_DllInfo*) in C++ will not be used by R

Following the instructions at https://github.com/kalibera/rchk/blob/master/doc/DOCKER.md#checking-a-package-from-a-tarball to check the latest version of {lightgbm} on CRAN.

wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/lightgbm_3.2.1.tar.gz
mkdir packages
cp lightgbm_3.2.1.tar.gz packages
docker run -v `pwd`/packages:/rchk/packages kalibera/rchk:latest /rchk/packages/lightgbm_3.2.1.tar.gz

Results in logs that end as follows.

Installed libraries of package  lightgbm 
[1] "/rchk/packages/libsonly/lightgbm/libs/lightgbm.so"

Library name (usually package name): lightgbm
ERROR: initialization function R_init_lightgbm(_DllInfo*) in C++ will not be used by R
ERROR: did not find initialization function R_init_lightgbm
ERROR: too many states (abstraction error?) in function strptime_internal
Analyzed 39643 functions, traversed 106572 states.

Rchk version: 3d653b7c8f92dac912532856b55f44d2986c6553
R version: 79889/R Under development (unstable) (2021-01-27 r79889)
LLVM version: 10.0.0

Description

If this job can be run on CI in less than 20 minutes, I think it should be included in the standard R checks run on every commit (https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/blob/47208894d819f1b8cef193e71f78e9a8c2f38462/.github/workflows/r_package.yml).

If not, it should be added as a standalone job that can be triggered by a comment like /gha run r-rchk. See https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/blob/47208894d819f1b8cef193e71f78e9a8c2f38462/.github/workflows/r_valgrind.yml for an example.

NOTE: when implementing this, the error too many states (abstraction error) in strptime_internal can safely be ignored. See kalibera/rchk#22 (comment).

References

Many thanks to @fabsig for bringing this up in #4390.

See #4390 (comment) for some details on the current state of this tool's output against master of LightGBM.

[jameslamb]

Per our policy in this project, I've added this feature request to #2302. Anyone is welcome to contribute this feature! If you'd like to contribute, say so in a comment here and this can be re-opened.

[jameslamb]

re-opening this as I am actively working on it.