raise a NOTE exception during R CMD check

Question

Is there any way I could raise my own NOTE exception from within the unit tests in the checking tests ... step of R CMD check?
In general I would like to have a NOTE in 00check.log if database was not available during unit tests.
Dirty solutions welcome.

Update: Actually I see much more use cases for such feature, adding bounty.

Answer 1

Generally tests are run in a separate process. The Log object that Dirk referred to is a local variable in the original process, so there's no way to access it.

Errors in the child process are detected by a non-zero return value. Other anomalies in the test script aren't seen unless you've saved a copy of the desired output; then the comparison of new output with old would see them.