R-devel-el-capitan-signed.pkg fails to download when testing on R devel

Dear colleagues,
I found that for:
language: r
os: osx
is unable to connect to https://r.research.att.com/el-capitan/R-devel/R-devel-el-capitan-signed.pkg (because the file does not exist, only R-devel-el-capitan.pkg).
Is it possible to fix it somehow?
Many thanks
Vojtech Spiwok

1 Like

I think you should mention @jimhester and @jeroen (although I am not sure if those links will work here, at least on the Github issue tracker it was that way for R issues)

You could also add the R tag (see https://travis-ci.community/c/languages/r)

I recommend you only test r-devel in linux, and use r-release or r-oldrel on macos. CRAN doesn’t publish OSX binary packages for r-devel: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/el-capitan/contrib/r-devel/

Thank you.

However, previous builds using r-devel on osx where working (e.g. here two months ago) when downloading R-devel-el-capitan-signed.pkg from research att. Now at https://r.research.att.com/el-capitan/R-devel/ there exists a file called R-devel-el-capitan.pkg. Could this be just an issue of a name change?

I mean, if we should not test r-devel on OSX, I would have expected that previous builds also failed.

R-devel constantly changes and may break any day. That’s why it’s called devel. It seems indeed broken now due to the changed filename.

Ok. So if it is better to avoid the combination osx and r-devel (unless there is some special need I guess), maybe it should be documented at https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/languages/r/ for future users? Thank you again for clarifying the issue.

I’m trying to get a package to Bioconductor, and they do check with R-devel on MacOS. They have provided a link to R-devel http://r.research.att.com/el-capitan/R-devel/R-devel-el-capitan.pkg. I can simply run R CMD check and Bioc check on my computer, but it would be nice to automatically test on Travis.

Excluding the devel/osx combo in the build matrix for the time being avoids the issue for me:

matrix:
  exclude:
    - r: devel
      os: osx

(Or with explicit includes like @rkrug did for this: Os: osx - which Xcode version for which r version - or wrong download link?)

Understandably the development builds will be more prone to breakage like @jeroen described, but if the devel/osx combo is specifically not recommended, I’d second the idea of a documentation update for clarity or even just a warning early in the job log. Testing devel on each OS might be overkill so I don’t mind excluding it, but the build matrix makes that the default behavior when you’ve specified multiple operating systems and language versions.

For what it’s worth the filename on the AT&T site changed yet again, about a day ago, so I can empathize with the maintainers on this:
https://r.research.att.com/el-capitan/R-devel/R-devel-el-capitan-sa-x86_64.tar.gz