Installation error in R 4.4.2, Ubuntu 22.04

[claravdw]

Trying to install devtools via install.packages("devtools") on Ubuntu 22.04 with R version 4.4.2 gives the following error:

* installing *source* package ‘devtools’ ...
** package ‘devtools’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** R
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
Error in .make_numeric_version(x, strict, .standard_regexps()$valid_numeric_version) : 
  invalid non-character version specification 'x' (type: double)
** help
*** installing help indices
*** copying figures
** building package indices
** installing vignettes
** testing if installed package can be loaded from temporary location
Error in .make_numeric_version(x, strict, .standard_regexps()$valid_numeric_version) : 
  invalid non-character version specification 'x' (type: double)
** testing if installed package can be loaded from final location
Error in .make_numeric_version(x, strict, .standard_regexps()$valid_numeric_version) : 
  invalid non-character version specification 'x' (type: double)
** testing if installed package keeps a record of temporary installation path
* DONE (devtools)

Session information:

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Running under: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/blas/libblas.so.3.10.0 
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lapack/liblapack.so.3.10.0

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

time zone: Europe/Paris
tzcode source: system (glibc)

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.4.2

[jennybc]

Recent versions of R have gained some tighter checks on the input to some version checking functions, so I've certainly seen and fixed related errors in the past little while.

Yet I don't know of any code in devtools that runs afoul of this. Nothing in CRAN checks, nothing in our CI, no other reports of problems.

So I feel like there has to be more to this story, in terms of why you're seeing this but others aren't.

[claravdw]

Just an update: apparently these errors did not actually prevent the package from being installed. Instead, when I load the package, I see the following:

> library(devtools)
Loading required package: usethis
Error in .make_numeric_version(x, strict, .standard_regexps()$valid_numeric_version) : 
  invalid non-character version specification 'x' (type: double)

But the package seems to be functioning otherwise, for instance I can successfully run:

devtools::install_github("farach/huggingfaceR")

[jennybc]

I have the feeling that the error is coming from some package we haven't identified yet (I don't think it's devtools or usethis) but that is being loaded when devtools loads. A sort of global "update packages" would be one relatively harmless thing to try. Because the culprit, whoever it is, has probably dealt with the error and you somehow just have a slightly outdated version of it. This is just a theory but we don't have a lot of information.

[claravdw]

Yes, you were right--running

update.packages()

fixed the issue!