[R-pkg-devel] vignette via devtools: sometimes found, sometimes not (same package)

[Alexandre Courtiol]

Dear all,
I am teaching a class and for that I created a R package that mostly
contains vignettes (the slides of the course).
I host the package on GitHub because I want the students to download every
day the latest version of the package.
Building the vignettes takes a couple of hours so I pre-build the vignettes
using devtools::build_vignettes before pushing my updates to GitHub.
The student install the package using
devtools::install_github("courtiol/LM2GLMM").
Then, they do library(LM2GLMM) and browseVignettes(package = "LM2GLMM")...

... and that works on 2/3 of the computers, for the others it says
vignettes not found.

Any idea why and what can I do to make it 100% success?
Of course on my laptop it works, so I cannot investigate.
Also, since they all use different versions of R, devtools or OS... I would
like to know the one thing that must be changed if it comes from that (but
I am not sure it does).

I have added a back up function that works for the 1/3 of unfortunate
students:

get_vignettes <- function() {
  utils::browseURL(paste0(find.package("LM2GLMM"), "/doc/")) ## for
installed
  utils::browseURL(paste0(find.package("LM2GLMM"), "/inst/doc/")) ## for
development
  return(invisible(NULL))
}

This functions opens de vignette folder and that shows that all the
students actually have the html files installed correctly. But it is ugly
because then they have to find the good html file and so forth, so I would
rather have a better solution.

Many thanks,

Alex

-- 
Alexandre Courtiol

http://sites.google.com/site/alexandrecourtiol/home

*"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"*, R. Feynman

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