Unable to install a package due to "invalid argument type"

[llrs]

Hi, many thanks for making easy to install packages from online resources.

I am stuck with an old R release (not sure if it is still supported) where I can't install a package with remotes on R 3.6.3 on Ubuntu 20.04:

remotes::install_github("fbreitwieser/pavian", force=TRUE)
## Using github PAT from envvar GITHUB_PAT
## Downloading GitHub repo fbreitwieser/pavian@HEAD
## Error: Failed to install 'pavian' from GitHub:
##   invalid argument type
traceback()
## 7: stop(remote_install_error(remotes[[i]], e))
## 6: value[[3L]](cond)
## 5: tryCatchOne(expr, names, parentenv, handlers[[1L]])
## 4: tryCatchList(expr, classes, parentenv, handlers)
## 3: tryCatch(res[[i]] <- install_remote(remotes[[i]], ...), error = function(e) {
##        stop(remote_install_error(remotes[[i]], e))
##    })
## 2: install_remotes(remotes, auth_token = auth_token, host = host, 
##        dependencies = dependencies, upgrade = upgrade, force = force, 
##        quiet = quiet, build = build, build_opts = build_opts, build_manual = build_manual, 
##        build_vignettes = build_vignettes, repos = repos, type = type, 
##        ...)
## 1: remotes::install_github("fbreitwieser/pavian", force = TRUE)

I could install it on R 4.0.1 on a Ubuntu 20.04.

Not sure this is related to #546, but my tracing of the error seems to come from a package dependency (I managed to get a different error while exploring the issues Error in !object$is_cran : invalid argument type).

[jimhester]

This is likely due to a dependency already installed on your system, it is tricky to determine which one, but you can do it using options(error = recover) and figuring out the package name by inspecting objects further up the call stack.

[llrs]

I was unable to understand how are the dependencies related to failing to install the package.
I tried manually to install the dependencies and found out that the problem exists for one of the (remote) dependencies: fbreitwieser/sankeyD3 even after I installed all the declared dependencies. Not sure what is going on and I can't dedicate more time on this. Many thanks for the quick reply and your support.

[llrs]

I had finally time to look this up. Writing this in case other find themselves on the same error.

Using the options(error = recover) I went down the rabbit hole till update.packages_deps were on (object$diff == UNAVAILABLE | object$diff == UNINSTALLED) & !object$is_cran L277 crashes because object is NULL because upgradable_packages a couple of lines above returned NULL. This was due to my .Renviron having the following line:

R_REMOTES_UPGRADE="ask" # https://remotes.r-lib.org/reference/update_packages.html

However Sys.getenv doesn't strip comments and returned:

Sys.getenv("R_REMOTES_UPGRADE")
# "ask # https://remotes.r-lib.org/reference/update_packages.html"

The simple fix was moving the comment above the line:

# https://remotes.r-lib.org/reference/update_packages.html
R_REMOTES_UPGRADE="ask" 

[francisbarton]

Thanks @llrs that is really helpful. I just had the Error in !object$is_cran : invalid argument type error when running devtools::install() - it was because I had just added R_REMOTES_UPGRADE = FALSE to my .Renviron.

I don't think it likes FALSE in that file (it would be OK as an argument to the function), so I have changed it to "never" instead, and that's fine.