[Bioc-devel] Bioconductor time out in Windows while building vignettes

I agree that we don't have a fully satisfying explanation of what's 
going on.

I investigated a little further and found the following:

1) I can reproduce this problem on a package that contains a dummy 
vignette with the following 1-line code chunk:

     utils::browseURL("https://bioconductor.org")

Running 'R CMD build' on such package on our Windows builder (riesling1) 
reproduces the problem i.e. the evaluation of the vignette gets stuck at 
the utils::browseURL() call. This call fires up the browser to display 
Bioconductor's home page but for some reason it doesn't return. Instead 
it waits for the browser to shut down.

2) If the browser is already up and running on the machine (we have 
Google Chrome on riesling1) then 'R CMD build' works fine. In this case 
the call to utils::browseURL() opens Bioconductor's home page in a new 
tab and returns immediately after that.

3) What makes all this kind of hard to reproduce is that it doesn't 
happen in an interactive R session i.e. if I start R and call 
utils::browseURL("https://bioconductor.org") interactively, everything 
works fine. So this problem only happens on Windows, in the context of 
'R CMD build' or 'R CMD check', and if the browser is not already running.

4) Unlike on Linux or Mac where utils::browseURL() uses system() to fire 
up the browser, on Windows it uses shell.exec() to open the URL. Note 
that shell.exec() relies on the Windows File Associations to find the 
right application to open the file or URL. See ?shell.exec.

So to me, everything points at a problem with shell.exec(). It would be 
great if someone could try to reproduce this.

Finally, note that this problem seems to have been affecting psichomics 
for a while based on this archived build report from last year:

   https://bioconductor.org/checkResults/3.11/bioc-LATEST/psichomics/

Best,
H.

[Bioc-devel] Bioconductor time out in Windows while building vignettes

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