I opened an issue on BiocManager ( https://github.com/Bioconductor/BiocManager/issues/39) somewhat related to Sean's recent post, about what BiocManager::install() should return, and it occurs to me that I should mention it here too for feedback:
> Having `BiocManager::install()` return the "pkgs" argument is not especially useful. Could it instead return success/error codes? Otherwise, how can you tell in a script whether the requested packages were installed successfully or not? The most basic return value I can think of would be like `require()`, TRUE if successful and FALSE if unsuccessful. More sophisticated behavior could give different error codes for different failures, although I don't know how difficult that would be to implement. This came up from wanting to test a Docker container for ability to install many different packages within it, and doing this by making a (hacked and specific to my purpose of installing/testing one package at a time) wrapper around `BiocManager::install()` that uses require() to test whether the installation was successful. That said, the workaround was not that difficult and it's probably not a priority for too many other users if you're hesitant to change the return value of BiocManager::install(). installcheck <- function(x){ if (x %in% installed.packages()) return(TRUE) BiocManager::install(x, ask=FALSE, update=FALSE) res <- require(x, character.only = TRUE) detach(paste0("package:", x), unload=TRUE, character.only = TRUE) return(res) } [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel