I'm posting this in case it helps some other developers getting build failure.
Recently package nlsr that I maintain got a message that it failed to build on some platforms. The exact source of the problem is still to be illuminated, but seems to be in knitr::render and/or pandoc or an unfortunate interaction. An update to pandoc triggered a failure to process a vignette that had been happily processed for several years. The error messages are unhelpful, at least to me, Error at "nlsr-devdoc.knit.md" (line 5419, column 1): unexpected end of input Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 64 Execution halted Unfortunately, adding "keep_md: TRUE" (you need upper case TRUE to save it when there is no error of this type), did not save the intermediate file in this case. However, searching for "pandoc error 64" presented one web page where the author used brute force search of his document by removing / replacing sections to find the line(s) that caused trouble. This is a little tedious, but effective. In my case, the offending line turned out to be a copied and pasted URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenberg%E2%80%93Marquardt_algorithm The coded characters can be replaced by a hyphen, to give, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenberg-Marquardt_algorithm and this, when pasted in Mozilla Firefox at least, will go to the appropriate wikipedia page. I'd be interested in hearing from others who have had similar difficulties. I suspect this is relatively rare, and causing some sort of infelicity in the output of knitr::render that then trips up some versions of pandoc, that may, for instance, be now applying stricter rules to URL syntax. Best, John Nash ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel