[R-pkg-devel] help diagnosing win-builder failures

[Ben Bolker]

   Hi folks,

   We're in the final stages of preparing a revised version of the 
glmmTMB package for CRAN and are stuck troubleshooting checks on 
win-builder/r-devel.

   Testing is working everywhere *except* win-builder/r-devel. 
Win-builder is OK with r-oldrel and r-devel; the same package is OK on 
GitHub actions with macOS/release, ubuntu/{release, devel} and 
windows/{oldrel, release, devel}: 
https://github.com/glmmTMB/glmmTMB/actions/runs/8316540364

   win-builder/r-devel output is cryptic. It reports:

1. an ERROR in running examples:

Running examples in 'glmmTMB-Ex.R' failed
The error most likely occurred in:

 > base::assign(".ptime", proc.time(), pos = "CheckExEnv")
 > ### Name: VarCorr.glmmTMB
 > ### Title: Extract variance and correlation components
 > ### Aliases: VarCorr.glmmTMB VarCorr
 > ### Keywords: internal
 >
 > ### ** Examples
 >
 > ## Comparing variance-covariance matrix with manual computation
 > data("sleepstudy",package="lme4")
 > fm4 <- glmmTMB(Reaction ~ Days + (Days|Subject), sleepstudy)

(this is the end of this output section.)

2. an ERROR running tests, where the output ends with a cryptic

   Anova: ..

(please try to refrain from snarky comments about not using testthat ...)

3. an ERROR building the vignettes:

--- re-building 'priors.rmd' using rmarkdown
(this is a new vignette, but it builds without a problem everywhere 
else, takes 10 seconds to build locally ...)

Full log is here, at least for a little while: 
https://win-builder.r-project.org/9I5WG5R8WJg3/00check.log

   We could admit defeat and throw ourselves on the CRAN-maintainers' 
mercy, but we would like to resolve these if we can.

   cheers
    Ben Bolker