texinfo not installing on github actions

[rmflight]

I am working on setting up github-actions Bioconductor building and checking of a package.

The vignette is an Sweave vignette, so it needs tinytex to build it. On linux, this also means that texinfo must be installed, however, the install command for texinfo always seems to fail on my linux builds. This seems odd, because I see lots of other people using the {install-tinytex} GH action, and I'm guessing it works for them.

https://github.com/MoseleyBioinformaticsLab/SDAMS/runs/4943474409?check_suite_focus=true#step:7:20

This does seem to be the first error I get on that build, and as far as I know, the rest of the errors are due to missing texi2dvi.

[michaelmayer]

You may want to run sudo apt-get update before the sudo apt-get install -y texinfo.

apt-get update downloads the package lists from the repositories and "updates" them to get information on the newest versions of packages and their dependencies. It will do this for all repositories and PPAs. In a docker container all of that metadata has been removed to keep the size of the container small. Running the command in a docker container will hence populate the package list to start with after which package installations will work.

[rmflight]

That was exactly the problem! I added sudo apt-get update for the linux runner, and the tinytex / texinfo installation now proceeds without error.

Thanks!