[Rd] Improving messaging on successful binary package installation

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 1/29/25 15:27, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
> I have been testing R-devel and really enjoying fast parallel
> downloading of R packages, especially on mac/win where there is no
> complication step either, it is super nice.
>
> Perhaps the install.packages() messaging could still be improved a
> bit. Right now if one installs a package on Windows/MacOS we see:
>
>    > install.packages('V8')
>    also installing the dependency ‘Rcpp’
>    trying URL 'https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/Rcpp_1.0.14.tgz'
>    trying URL 'https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.5/V8_6.0.0.tgz'
>    The downloaded binary packages are in
>    /var/folders/46/wtyv3f9n7g1657wntpn0cl540000gn/T//RtmpMd0YSV/downloaded_packages
>
>
> In the above output, there is no confirmation that the package
> installation was successful. Instead we get a message that download
> binary packages are to be found in a temporary directory, making it
> seem as if the user has to do something with this? This is confusing.

You may have forgotten to mention above that the output also says:

package 'V8' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

which means the installation was successful.

Tomas

>
> Perhaps the messaging could be improved by not showing this tempir.
> Instead install.packages() could end with a short success summary
> like:
>
>    Successfully installed packages 'V8', 'Rcpp' in
>       /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources/library
>
> Or we could not show any directory at all. But at least the user knows
> installation has succeeded.
>
> While we're at it, the phrasing "trying URL" is a bit odd, both words
> are redundant in this context. Maybe it can just be replaced by
> "Downloading"
>
> These are silly details but I think they make a difference especially
> to novice users.
>
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