For reference, this has been addressed in R-devel, R now falls back to
copy when symlinking of the package directory silently fails.
Thanks to Duncan for his analysis and a patch that fixed this.
Tomas
On 12/11/19 5:22 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
The thread starting with this message:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2019q4/004745.html
described problems Rich Heiberger was having with package checking on
Windows. It appeared that during the tests of examples, an old
version of the package was loaded but the new tests were being run,
causing lots of confusion and trouble.
I reproduced the error, and I think I've found the cause. I had his
package tarball on a network drive, with a local drive being used for
the session temporary directory. The check code needs a copy of the
package installed in the temporary directory, and already has one in
the pkg.Rcheck directory where the check is taking place, so it tries
to create a junction linking them. (On non-Windows systems it uses a
symlink.)
Apparently the junction creation silently fails: an empty directory
appears on the temp dir. When R loads the package code, it doesn't
find it in the temp dir, and goes looking in other libraries, where it
found an older versions of the package.
A workaround for this issue is to set the environment variable
R_WIN_NO_JUNCTIONS=yes
before doing the check. This causes the check code to copy all the
files into the temp dir and things are fine.
I don't know whether the junction creation should have succeeded, or
whether it should have signalled an error when it didn't, but it might
make sense for R to do a simple sanity check after trying to create
the junction (e.g. test for the presence of DESCRIPTION in the newly
created location), falling back to a copy if things didn't succeed.
Duncan Murdoch
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