Failure during installation of devtools

[l8l]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. On Arch and on Debian (both x86-64), when trying to install devtools via install.packages("devtools"), errors are returned, namely

Warning messages:
1: In install.packages("devtools") :
  installation of package ‘textshaping’ had non-zero exit status
2: In install.packages("devtools") :
  installation of package ‘ragg’ had non-zero exit status
3: In install.packages("devtools") :
  installation of package ‘pkgdown’ had non-zero exit status
4: In install.packages("devtools") :
  installation of package ‘devtools’ had non-zero exit status

I tried following what is suggested in this stackexchange post but this did not work for me. Besides, next to my local system (where the suggestion does not work despite having installed the external libraries like fribidi), I also want to install devtools on a remote cluster, where I do not have admin rights. On that cluster, I can not even install the external libraries because that seems to require sudo-rights. Usually packages added within a package manager do not require to install anything external but pull all necessary dependencies (also of libraries of other languages) themselves. Why does this not happen here and what is one supposed to do?

Describe the solution you'd like The package manager should pull by itself all dependencies needed during installation for devtools.

[l8l]

After several failed attempts, I managed to resolve the problems, using conda and want to share this for others who might face the same issue.

You can install the lightweight miniconda without needs for admin rights with the instructions here. After that, all it takes is:

conda create --name my_R_environment
conda activate my_R_environment
conda install r-base --channel conda-forge 
conda install r-devtools --channel conda-forge

This automatically pulled all necessary dependencies just like I was imagining it and did not require additional rights. Should work on any machine. = )

[FeifeiZhou-288]

I encountered the same issue and resolved it by installing via conda, just like you did.