[R-pkg-devel] Problem loading package on Windoze.

[Rolf Turner]

I am developing a package ("ldEst" --- lethal dose estimation) for a 
group of consulting clients.  (The package may in the future be released 
upon the unsuspecting public, but for the moment it has to stay 
confidential, sad to say.)

The clients run Windoze (sad to say).  In the past I have sent them the 
source of the package, which they have the facilities to install.  The 
latest release of the package however threw an error:

>> install.packages("C:/Users/abel122/Dropbox/PFR/ldEst_3.0-12.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")
> 
> Error in rawToChar(block[seq_len(ns)]) : 
>   embedded nul in string: '\037‹\b\0\0\0\0\0\0\003ì}\a`\024ÕÖ0‚\200,HGºN–¶\033&›ì¦\001aÁ\220Є„\022\b\201\020p³;I\006¶„-)T\021P\024\005, \002Š" E¤ƒ\024\001)‚"*J\023”&\210R\024\vEšÿ=·LÙ’„÷ž¼ïû~xÏìîÌ'
> Warning in install.packages :
>   installation of package ‘C:/Users/abel122/Dropbox/PFR/ldEst_3.0-12.tar.gz’ had non-zero exit status

Flummoxed by this I thought I'd just get Uwe Ligges' win-builder to 
build a Windoze binary, and sent that to the clients.  The win-build 
went without problem, but when I sent the binary to one of the clients 
he got the error:

> Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘ldEst’ in get(method, envir = home):
>  lazy-load database 'C:/Users/abel122/Documents/R/win-library/3.6/ldEst/R/ldEst.rdb' is corrupt
> In addition: Warning messages:
> 1: In .registerS3method(fin[i, 1], fin[i, 2], fin[i, 3], fin[i, 4],  :
>   restarting interrupted promise evaluation
> 2: In get(method, envir = home) :
>   restarting interrupted promise evaluation
> 3: In get(method, envir = home) : internal error -3 in R_decompress1

I (sad to say) have no idea what any of this really means.

The package installs, loads, and  runs just fine on my Ubuntu system,
and builds without error on win-builder.

Can any suggest a way that I might track down what's causing the error(s).

I realise this is a big ask without your having the package to 
experiment on, but I thought that someone clever out there might be able 
to offer some insight.  E.g. what might I do to find out what is 
triggering that "embedded nul in string" business?

Thanks for any tips.

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276