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Bug in R CMD INSTALL when handling invalid LazyData DESCRIPTION field

3 messages · Martin Maechler, Aaron Wells

Original
Aaron Wells
# 
Hi, I think I've found a bug in R CMD INSTALL. When it tries to parse a
DESCRIPTION file with an invalid LazyData field, it errors out while
trying to print the correct error message:
* installing to library ?/home/example/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4?
* installing *source* package ?samplepackage? ...
** data
Error in errmsg("invalid value of ", field, " field in DESCRIPTION") :
  could not find function "errmsg"
* removing ?/home/example/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4/samplepackage?


It should instead be using that errmsg() function to print the more
helpful error message: "invalid value of LazyData field in DESCRIPTION".

I've traced it down to this line of code in tools:::.install_packages()
https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/library/tools/R/install.R#L977
. The errmsg() function actually is defined earlier on in the function,
but there seems to be a scoping issue that makes it not available here.

I've uploaded a sample project to reproduce the bug here:
https://github.com/agwells/R-CMD-INSTALL-bug

I'm running R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28), on Ubuntu 16.04.

Cheers,
Aaron
Martin Maechler
# 
> Hi, I think I've found a bug in R CMD INSTALL. When it tries to parse a
    > DESCRIPTION file with an invalid LazyData field, it errors out while
    > trying to print the correct error message:

    >> R CMD INSTALL .
    > * installing to library ?/home/example/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4?
    > * installing *source* package ?samplepackage? ...
    > ** data
    > Error in errmsg("invalid value of ", field, " field in DESCRIPTION") :
    > could not find function "errmsg"
    > * removing ?/home/example/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4/samplepackage?


    > It should instead be using that errmsg() function to print the more
    > helpful error message: "invalid value of LazyData field in DESCRIPTION".

    > I've traced it down to this line of code in tools:::.install_packages()
    > https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/src/library/tools/R/install.R#L977
    > . The errmsg() function actually is defined earlier on in the function,
    > but there seems to be a scoping issue that makes it not available here.

    > I've uploaded a sample project to reproduce the bug here:
    > https://github.com/agwells/R-CMD-INSTALL-bug

    > I'm running R version 3.4.2 (2017-09-28), on Ubuntu 16.04.

    > Cheers,
    > Aaron

Thank you very much, Aaron.
This is indeed a bug, and it looks that I had caused it when
introducing the internal str_parse() utlity.

It's too bad this is so close before release of R 3.4.3 and the
fix to the bug is not trivial (not very hard either) such that
it most probably will not make it into 3.4.3.

Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich
2 days later
Aaron Wells
# 
Well, on the positive side, it seems to be a fairly limited bug. :)

You have to actually have a syntax error in your DESCRIPTION file, and
it needs to be in one of the fields passed to parse_description_field()
as defined in tools:::.install_packages(); which is only Biarch,
LazyData, ByteCompile, and KeepSource.

Cheers,
Aaron
On 11/24/2017 09:18 PM, Martin Maechler wrote: