Github action: E: Package 'pandoc-citeproc' has no installation candidate

[paul.buerkner]

Hi all,

I have an issue with pandoc-citeproc in my github-action workflow for R CMD check in the brms package.

On one of my builts on Ubuntu 24.04, I get the following error: "E: Package 'pandoc-citeproc' has no installation candidate"

The link to the failing built can be found here (R release): more workflow fixes · paul-buerkner/brms@3d85b1c · GitHub

Interestingly, it works with a slighly different setup also on Ubuntu (R devel): more workflow fixes · paul-buerkner/brms@3d85b1c · GitHub

Here is my current workflow yaml file: brms/.github/workflows/R-CMD-check.yaml at master · paul-buerkner/brms · GitHub

I have not worked with workflows much so far, so I would appreciate any help or insights.

Thank you,
Paul

[jdblischak]

I recognize this pandoc-citeproc error from transitioning some of my workflows from Ubuntu 22 to 24. If you don't have time to debug this at the moment, a temporary workaround which should work is to change the image from ubuntu-latest to ubuntu-22.04.

Longer term of course you'll want to fix this. It is strange how it is fine for the other two builds in the build matrix. Your R-devel build is the only one in which pak identifies two packages that have a system dependency on pandoc-citeproc:

  * pandoc                - knitr, rmarkdown, loo, rstantools, bayesplot, rstan, StanHeaders            
  * pandoc-citeproc       - loo, bayesplot 

Unclear to me why. The main difference between the build variants is this PR from 2022 that pinned setup-r to v2.2.6 and installed different versions of rtools. Are these workarounds still needed in 2025? v2.2.6 is years old, and my guess is that there is some miscommunication between it and the other actions (which are all using the latest @v2).

[paul.buerkner]

Thank you for your fast response!

Indeed, using ubuntu-22.04 fixed it for now. When playing around more, I noticed that sometimes R-devel and sometimes R-release failed on Ubuntu for the same issue, while then the other ran through. No clue what was the issue there. I will try out the latest ubuntu again in a couple of months and see if the issue has resolved itself.