R-package development using travis CI gets error due to failing to install dependency package

Question

In RStudio, I'm using usethis::use_travis() and TRAVIS CI with Github. However, my package cannot build because yardstick 0.0.7 cannot build.

Note that my package can build locally with both rcmdcheck() and devtools::check(); and my package is not directly dependent on yardstick, but it is rather a dependency of a dependency: so I cannot just make my package dependent on an earlier more stable version of yardstick.

I am stuck not knowing how to continue!

Is it perhaps possible to specify, for example in the .travis.yml file, a specific version for yardstick (even though it is a dependency of a dependency)?

(According to the yardstick website the package fail to build https://yardstick.tidymodels.org/ ; and it looks like it's been this way for 5 months; https://travis-ci.org/github/tidymodels/yardstick).

Any help is much appreciated! John

Answer 1

I think that the yardstick 0.0.7 has not been built yet on CRAN; however for now I got it to work by adding this to the .trvis.yml file:

 global:
   - _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_: false

Answer 2

I strongly suspect that this is result of a bug in the remotes package where the order of installation gets bungled, and then packages like yardstick, which depend on packages like tibble, cannot install during time periods when both have had recent CRAN releases and binaries are not available yet.

This bug has been fixed in the development version of remotes but it can be difficult to get the development version of remotes installed on a CI platform like Travis. There is a new release on remotes in the works right now.

I know this isn't a solution, but it is an explanation of what is going on at least.