Documentation on how to override defaults and *not* install binary versions of packages?

[Robinlovelace]

Container image name

rocker/geospatial

Container image digest

Not sure

What operating system related to this question?

Linux

System information

Not relevant

Question

Can the documentation explain how to override the defaults to install everything from binary versions shipped by RStudio? I need to re-compile sf but install.packages("sf") fails with the following:

install.packages("sf")
Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/__linux__/jammy/latest/src/contrib/sf_1.0-12.tar.gz'
Content type 'binary/octet-stream' length 3498486 bytes (3.3 MB)

I've tried adding type = "source" and a few other things but the only way I got it to work was installing from GitHub with

remotes::install_github("r-spatial/sf")

I think this documentation would live well here: https://rocker-project.org/use/extending.html

Context with reproducible example you can try: geocompx/geocompr#948 (comment)

[eddelbuettel]

Have you tried changing the value of options("repos") ?

For this particular stack the value is considered a feature, not a bug.

[cboettig]

@Robinlovelace thanks, yeah we should document this better -- it is annoying that RSPM snapshots don't honor type="source" on install.packages(). To install from source using RSPM repos you simply drop the architecture bits from the repo URL, i.e. drop the __linux__/jammy

options(repos = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest")

(or similar for the versioned snapshots. Obviously for 'latest' installs from source you can also just point at CRAN). Note that the rocker/geospatial:dev-osgeo tags do this by default, since we need to build sf and friends against the manually compiled latest versions of osgeo)

Where would be the most obvious place to document this?

[Robinlovelace]

Somewhere in this page was my thinking, but not sure where: https://rocker-project.org/use/extending.html

[eitsupi]

I think this is documented on this page.
https://rocker-project.org/images/versioned/r-ver.html#switch-the-default-cran-mirror

It would be very helpful if you could submit a PR for improvement on this page.

[Robinlovelace]

I'm going to give you suggestion a go @cboettig, finally:

options(repos = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest")

I will tag this issue in the commits in case of use. Will try to make edits to that page also @eitsupi thanks for the suggestion.