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

[Georgi Boshnakov]

Hi,

The problem is indeed difficult to debug but there are things that can be done to narrow it down.

1. Are there 1/3 unlucky computers fixed? (I.e does the problem occur always on the same computers) Also, do you really mean computer or user?

2. Are the students working under R studio? If so, does the same problem appear if the same procedure is run outside R studio.

3. Further to 2.,  You mention development mode - do (some) students also have a copy of your repository? This may be aproblem if they don't update it too.

4. What happens if R is restarted? 

5. It may be worth checking .Rprofle and similar for the concerned computers (or users, see 1.)

Hope this is of some help.


 Georgi Boshnakov         


________________________________________
From: R-package-devel [r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org] on behalf of Alexandre Courtiol [alexandre.courtiol at gmail.com]
Sent: 16 April 2018 14:40
To: List r-package-devel
Subject: [R-pkg-devel] vignette via devtools: sometimes found, sometimes not (same package)

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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