callr is getting blocked by group policy

[jake-wittman]

I'm trying to use the targets package on my work computer, which is under a pretty heavy lockdown from our system administrator. I ran into an issue where something in our group policy blocked a program from running; some troubleshooting with the targets maintainer pointed me towards callr. I'm hoping someone can help me identify what exactly is being blocked by our group policy, so I can take it to our system admin and ask for permissions. I'm not an IT expert, so maybe at this point I just need to work with them to identify the issue but they're understaffed and any time I can get more information for them on the front end, I try to.

Running callr::r(function() TRUE) results in this error:

The .Last.error.trace produces this:

Thanks!

Session Info: R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22 ucrt) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit) Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)

Matrix products: default

locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

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

other attached packages: [1] targets_0.12.1 forcats_0.5.1 stringr_1.4.0 dplyr_1.0.9 purrr_0.3.4
[6] readr_2.1.2 tidyr_1.2.0 tibble_3.1.7 ggplot2_3.3.6 tidyverse_1.3.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] Rcpp_1.0.8.3 lubridate_1.8.0 here_1.0.1 lattice_0.20-45
[5] listenv_0.8.0 ps_1.7.0 assertthat_0.2.1 rprojroot_2.0.3
[9] digest_0.6.29 utf8_1.2.2 parallelly_1.32.0 cellranger_1.1.0 [13] R6_2.5.1 backports_1.4.1 reprex_2.0.1 evaluate_0.15
[17] httr_1.4.3 pillar_1.7.0 rlang_1.0.2 readxl_1.4.0
[21] rstudioapi_0.13 data.table_1.14.2 callr_3.7.0 raster_3.5-15
[25] rmarkdown_2.14 foreign_0.8-82 igraph_1.3.2 munsell_0.5.0
[29] broom_0.8.0 compiler_4.2.0 modelr_0.1.8 xfun_0.31
[33] pkgconfig_2.0.3 htmltools_0.5.2 globals_0.15.1 tidyselect_1.1.2 [37] codetools_0.2-18 fansi_1.0.3 future_1.26.1 crayon_1.5.1
[41] tzdb_0.3.0 dbplyr_2.2.0 withr_2.5.0 grid_4.2.0
[45] jsonlite_1.8.0 gtable_0.3.0 lifecycle_1.0.1 DBI_1.1.2
[49] magrittr_2.0.3 units_0.8-0 scales_1.2.0 stringi_1.7.6
[53] cli_3.3.0 fs_1.5.2 sp_1.5-0 xml2_1.3.3
[57] ellipsis_0.3.2 generics_0.1.2 vctrs_0.4.1 tools_4.2.0
[61] glue_1.6.2 hms_1.1.1 fastmap_1.1.0 processx_3.5.3
[65] parallel_4.2.0 yaml_2.3.5 colorspace_2.0-3 terra_1.5-34
[69] rvest_1.0.2 base64url_1.4 knitr_1.39 haven_2.5.0
[73] usethis_2.1.6

[gaborcsardi]

I don't know much about group policies, but fwiw this is where the error is thrown: https://github.com/cran/processx/blob/78aa4cb9ab119eca6563386ddbd74037aeb4e819/src/win/processx.c#L1028-L1040

Also, I doubt that this makes a difference, but you could also update your package versions of callr and processx.

[gaborcsardi]

I am closing this now, but please feel free to re-open in light of new information.