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installationDriver

Barry Zeeberg [aut, cre]

2026-09-26

Automate Recursively Determining and Installing Missing dependencies.

 

 

Barry Zeeberg



I was using my previous packages noviceDeveloperResources and noviceDeveloperResources2 to automatically load a list of packages, when I encountered an obscure error message. I eventually tracked down the error, which arose from several recursive dependencies not being installed in my library.

I developed the current package InstallationDriver to avoid this problem for myself and other users in the future. It recursively finds any missing CRAN package dependencies (“Depends”, “Imports”, “LinkingTo”) and installs them from the CRAN repository. The main mechanisms used are tools::package_dependencies() and utils::install.packages().

Here is an example transcript obtained after I had purposely removed the dependency hash



Technical Note: Return Value of install.packages()

Not well documented anywhere, but I fortuitously noticed that verbose=TRUE generates a message with the word “succeeded” when installing from a local source .tar.gz https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64797849/how-to-save-verbose-output . I had previously used this approach in NoviceDeveloperResources::checkBuildInstallSourcePackage().

In contrast, upon failure, we can detect “NA” rather than “succeeded”

When applying this to a download from remote CRAN repository, the return codes are different

Upon failure

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.