[Rd] R-devel_2015-09-14 throws an error in reg-packages test

[Avraham Adler]

Hello.

I have successfully built R on windows scores of times, and have never
come across this problem. For this build, I am using the current 4.6.3
prerelease version of Rtools, Windows7 64 bit, and
R-devel_2015-09-14.tar.gz

When running make check, I get the following error:


running code in 'reg-packages.R' ...make[3]: *** [reg-packages.Rout] Error 1
make[2]: *** [test-Reg] Error 2
make[1]: *** [test-all-basics] Error 1
make: *** [check] Error 2


Looking at reg-packages.Rout.fail shows:

>
> ## else w/o clause:
> ## could use file.copy(recursive = TRUE)
> system(paste('cp -R', shQuote(pkgSrcPath), shQuote(tempdir())))
> pkgPath <- file.path(tempdir(), "Pkgs")
> ## pkgB tests an empty R directory
> dir.create(file.path(pkgPath, "pkgB", "R"), recursive = TRUE,
+        showWarnings = FALSE)
> p.lis <- if("Matrix" %in% row.names(installed.packages(.Library)))
+          c("pkgA", "pkgB", "exNSS4") else "exNSS4"
> for(p. in p.lis) {
+     cat("building package", p., "...\n")
+     r <- build.pkg(file.path(pkgPath, p.))
+     cat("installing package", p., "using file", r, "...\n")
+     ## we could install the tar file ... (see build.pkg()'s definition)
+     install.packages(r, lib = "myLib", repos=NULL, type = "source")
+     stopifnot(require(p.,lib = "myLib", character.only=TRUE))
+     detach(pos = match(p., sub("^package:","", search())))
+ }
building package pkgA ...
Error: dir.exists(dir) is not TRUE
Execution halted

This error does NOT occur when building R-patched_2015-09-13, so it
must be something in R-devel.

A similar question was asked previously in 2012, once on r-help [1]
and once here [2], but did not receive any answer.

Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Avi

[1] <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help//2012-October/337237.html>
[2] <https://mailman.stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel//2012-October/065002.html>