[R-pkg-devel] crowdsourcing/help with

[Ben Bolker]

   We (the glmmTMB developers) are having a hard-to-reproduce problem on 
Windows.  When run on CRAN's check platform or win-builder with r-devel, 
the code fails on the first example, when trying to reconstruct a 'TMB' 
object (TMB is a C++-based package we depend on). The problem is that we 
can't find a Windows system *other* than win-builder on which it fails 
-- it works on r-hub, and with 2 or 3 other Windows 10/11 systems we've 
tried it on.

   I suspect this has to do with an incompatibility in the binary stack 
- there is a dependency chain Matrix → TMB → glmmTMB, and we know that 
weird stuff can happen if the stack is incompatible (e.g. TMB was built 
with an older version of Matrix than is currently installed), but 
haven't managed to put together a stack that fails.

   If anyone with a Windows system handy would be willing to try this 
out and see if it works that would be *super* handy (especially if you 
can get it to fail!)

   You can read all about it here:

https://github.com/glmmTMB/glmmTMB/issues/787

    If you just want to grab the tarball so you can run R CMD check on 
it, try:

r <- remotes::remote_download(github_remote("glmmTMB/glmmTMB/glmmTMB"))
file.rename(r, "my_glmmtmb_tarball.tar.gz")

    If you do manage to get it to fail, it would be great to see 
detailed output from

library(glmmTMB)
up2date(readRDS(system.file("example_files","salamander1.rds",package="glmmTMB")))

   Any other debugging/diagnostic suggestions are of course welcome.
   (If this fails we will probably have to put "skip if on Windows" 
logic around most of our examples and tests.)

   cheers
     Ben Bolker