Catch Error/Warning from Install.Packages() - R [duplicate] - r

Question

Consider the following usage:
tryCatch(log("a"), error = function(e) NULL)
#NULL
Now I'm trying to do essentially the same, but in a more complicated fashion. I have two network repositories, and I'd like to install packages from the second if the first is not available for some reason. Here's how I do it:
pkg_location <- c("file://main_repo", "file://extra_repo")
lapply(pkg_location, function(repo)
{
tryCatch(install.packages("my-cool-package",
contriburl = repo, dependencies = TRUE),
error = function(e) NULL)
})
And I'm expecting a list of NULLs. However, the error is not suppressed:
Installing package into ‘...’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
cannot open compressed file '//extra_repo/PACKAGES',
probable reason 'No such file or directory'
Error in install.packages : cannot open the connection
[[1]]
NULL
[[2]]
NULL
It seems like install.packages somehow ignores the mechanism. How is that possible, why is that happening and how can I approach the problem?
Here's sessionInfo, probably worth noting I'm running RStudio 0.98.977.
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.1.2

Answer 1

RStudio does not exectute the normal install.packages but instead does its own thing:
look at the code in RStudio:
> install.packages
function (...)
.rs.callAs(name, hook, original, ...)
<environment: 0x3e4b478>
> .rs.callAs
function (name, f, ...)
{
withCallingHandlers(tryCatch(f(...), error = function(e) {
cat("Error in ", name, " : ", e$message, "\n", sep = "")
}), warning = function(w) {
cat("Warning in ", name, " :\n ", w$message, "\n", sep = "")
invokeRestart("muffleWarning")
})
}
<environment: 0x3bafa38>
weird code, it recalls itself ...
i was expecting a .Primitive() somewhere
> sum
function (..., na.rm = FALSE) .Primitive("sum")
but it is an ugly RStudio hack. if you look at install.packages in normal R you get:
head(install.packages) # it is really long :P
1 function (pkgs, lib, repos = getOption("repos"), contriburl = contrib.url(repos,
2 type), method, available = NULL, destdir = NULL, dependencies = NA,
3 type = getOption("pkgType"), configure.args = getOption("configure.args"),
4 configure.vars = getOption("configure.vars"), clean = FALSE,
5 Ncpus = getOption("Ncpus", 1L), verbose = getOption("verbose"),
6 libs_only = FALSE, INSTALL_opts, quiet = FALSE, keep_outputs = FALSE,
....

Answer 2

I'm going to suggest closing as off-topic because this is an RStudio problem. Basically, tryCatch is catching the error, but RStudio's error handler prints the error anyway. Thus the reason you're getting a return value:
[[1]]
NULL
[[2]]
NULL
This means tryCatch works. RStudio just prints caught errors weirdly.

Answer 3

Use the namespaced invocation:
utils::install.packages()