Github Action R CMD Check - Failed to build soruce quantreg on Ubuntu oldrel-1

[Psyasimov]

Hi, I recently discovered github actions and implemented the R-CMD-Check for a package.
While previously everything ran smooth, I just recently ran into a problem with the
Ubuntu-latest, for installing quantreg:
ubuntu-latest (oldrel-1)

<callr_remote_error: Failed to build source package 'quantreg'>

I am not quite sure how to go from here or how to fix it. Should I file a bug report to the maintainer of quantreg?
I don't use the quantreg package directly however I guess it is a dependency of one of my imports.
The imports for my package are

Imports:
    pacman,
    Hmisc,
    xtable,
    dplyr,
    tidyr,
    utils,
    ggplot2,
    ggpubr,
    rstatix,
    knitr,
    kableExtra,
    boot,
    magrittr,
    psych,
    flextable,
    stringr,
    tibble,
    xfun,
    rlang

I just read a bit more into the error report. The following error seems to be the root of the problem

  OE> installing to /tmp/RtmpXijG1K/pkg-lib231b1c742aae/quantreg/libs
  OE> ** R
  OE> Error in parse(outFile) : 
  OE>   /tmp/Rtmp8P7hyi/R.INSTALL2b31468b3274/quantreg/R/anova.R:62:45: unexpected input
  OE> 61:             for (i in 2:nobjects) {
  OE> 62:                 if (!all(sapply(names[[i]], \
  OE>                                                 ^
  OE> ERROR: unable to collate and parse R files for package ‘quantreg’
  OE> * removing ‘/tmp/RtmpXijG1K/pkg-lib231b1c742aae/quantreg’

Any help on how to fix it would be highly appreciated.

Solution:

How one would do this is by editing the .github/check-standard.yaml and removing there the following line:
- {os: ubuntu-latest, r: 'oldrel-1'}

[Gabor]

That syntax (quantreg/anova.R at 6964fff892ea20af9633cd7279891c0c431e80bf · cran/quantreg · GitHub) needs R 4.1.0, so the quantreg package will not work on R 4.0.x.

[Psyasimov]

Thanks for the fast reply.
I run / developed the package on R4.1.1 (at least according to my sessioninfo)

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.1.1 (2021-08-10)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

Is this something I need / can specify in the DESCRIPTION file? Or is this something I need to configure with regards to the github action?

[Gabor]

oldrel-1 is the release before the current release and it is R 4.0.5 currently. So that job on GHA will fail, and you probably want to remove it from your workflow file.

[shannon.lewis]

Shouldn't the Package developer update the depends to indicate R 4.1.0 or greater?

[Gabor]

Yes, that would be better. Or even better, just remove that single instance of \(...) (replace it with function()) and then the package (probably) works on older R versions as well.

[shannon.lewis]

yes that would be better

[Gabor]

You can try opening an issue in their repository.

[shannon.lewis]

I sent the maintainer an email, hopefully that they can/will update (which ever way they choose).
Thanks for the suggestion.