renv::restore() fails to install multiple packages, needs RTools

[petelaud]

TL;DR: Suggest adding an instruction to install RTools in /contribution/get_started.html

I encountered an error running renv::restore() on Windows, when following the "Get started with your environment" instructions. The following error terminates the processing of any further package installations:

Error: Error installing package 'mvtnorm':
===================================

* installing *source* package 'mvtnorm' ...
** this is package 'mvtnorm' version '1.3-3'
** package 'mvtnorm' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** libs
Error in system(paste(MAKE, p1(paste("-f", shQuote(makefiles))), "compilers"),  : 
  'make' not found
* removing 'D:/Pete/Documents/GitHub/CAMIS/renv/staging/1/mvtnorm'
install of package 'mvtnorm' failed [error code 1]

I found a similar issue mentioned here: #7 which didn't seem resolved, though there was a suggestion to reinstall renv. I tried both install.packages("renv@1.0.10") and install.packages("renv"), to no avail. The later version did at least continue attempting to install other packages, but a large number of them failed:

Successfully installed 146 packages in 150 seconds.
The following package(s) were not installed successfully:
- [backports]: install failed
- [cli]: install failed
- [curl]: install failed
- [data.table]: install failed
- [exactRankTests]: install failed
- [fracdiff]: install failed
- [fs]: install failed
- [glue]: install failed
- [lazyeval]: install failed
- [lmom]: install failed
- [magrittr]: install failed
- [mvtnorm]: install failed
...
- [asht]: dependency failed (exact2x2, exactci, bpcp, coin)
- [beeca]: dependency failed (dplyr, lifecycle)
- [blob]: dependency failed (rlang, vctrs)
- [bpcp]: dependency failed (ggplot2)
- [broom]: dependency failed (backports, cli, dplyr, glue, lifecycle, purrr, rlang, stringr, tibble, tidyr)
- [bslib]: dependency failed (cachem, htmltools, jquerylib, lifecycle, memoise, rlang, sass)
- [cachem]: dependency failed (rlang) 
...
Error: failed to install "DOS2", "DT", "DescTools", "FactoMineR", "Hmisc", "MatchIt", "PowerTOST", "QuickJSR", "Rcpp", "RcppArmadillo", "RcppEigen", "RcppParallel", "RcppTOML", "S7", "StanHeaders", "TMB", "V8", "asht", "backports", "beeca", "bit64", "blob", "bpcp", "broom", "bslib", "cachem", "callr", "car", "cards", "cardx", "cellranger", "censReg", "checkmate", "chk", "cli", "clubSandwich", "coin", "collapse", "conflicted", "contrast", "cowplot", "crosstalk", "cubature", "curl", "data.table", "dbplyr", "dendextend", "desc", "details", "distributional", "doBy", "dplyr", "dtplyr", "emmeans", "epiR", "exact2x2", "exactRankTests", "exactci", "factoextra", "flextable", "fmtr", "fontawesome", "forcats", "forecast", "fracdiff", "fs", "furrr", "future", "gargle", "gdtools", "geepack", "ggplot2", "ggpubr", "ggrepel", "ggsci", "ggsignif", "ggsurvfit", "ggtext", "gld", "glmmTMB", "glmnet", "glue", "googledrive", "googlesheets4", "gridExtra", "gridtext", "gsDesign", "gsDesign2", "gt", "gtable", 

A Google search on the error message suggested I might need to install RTools to allow packages to be built from source (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/), which does seem to resolve the issue.

Suggest this dependency should be mentioned in the instructions.

Note, I recall having a similar issue on my previous Mac installation as well, but don't remember how I resolved it. RTools is Windows-specific, so it can't have been that. At some point I will try going through setup again to see if I can reproduce the error.

[DrLynTaylor]

Thanks Pete. I often get similar issues when trying to renv restore/ use rtools. @abiterry will take a look to see if we can make this any easier. What i've done in the past, is just use my version of packages, then submit the PR and then we can check it still works when we pull it in to the locked version on CAMIS.