[Bioc-devel] Dependency on devtools in biocLite()

[Andrzej Oleś]

Dear all,

it's great that for some time now `biocLite()` also resolves package
dependencies for GitHub hosted packages. However, as this functionality
depends on devtools, an attempt to install a GitHub package when devtools
is not installed results in an error

> library(BiocInstaller)
> biocLite("aoles/RBioFormats")
BioC_mirror: https://bioconductor.org
Using Bioconductor 3.4 (BiocInstaller 1.24.0), R 3.3.2 (2016-10-31).
Error: package 'devtools' not available: there is no package called
‘devtools’

If this is the case, one would typically need to first install devtools,
and rerun the biocLite command. I was wondering whether it would make sense
to modify the behavior such that before attempting to call
`devtools::install` in

https://github.com/Bioconductor-mirror/BiocInstaller/blob/
9965cc72d009bfcae6776a02e5abb94cbd5dd109/R/biocLite.R#L48

first check for devtools availability and try to automatically install it
if missing (maybe by prompting the user). What do you think?

Cheers,
Andrzej

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]