RStudio learnr package error "ERROR: compilation failed for package 'backports'"

Question

First question on StackOverflow. I will try to be clear.

I just installed

1. R 4.0.1 for Windows 10

2. RStudio (RStudio 1.3.959) for Windows 10

I tried to install learnr package, which required many other packages. The console prints toward the end:

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• installing source package 'backports' ... ** package 'backports' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked ** using staged installation ** libs "c:/rtools40/mingw64/bin/"gcc -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-40~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG -O2 -Wall -std=gnu99 -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -mstackrealign -c dotsElt.c -o dotsElt.o /bin/sh: c:/rtools40/mingw64/bin/gcc: No such file or directory make: *** [dotsElt.o] Error 127 ERROR: compilation failed for package 'backports'
• removing 'C:/Users/micha/Documents/R/win-library/4.0/backports' Warning in install.packages : installation of package ‘backports’ had non-zero exit status
• installing source package 'isoband' ... ** package 'isoband' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked ** using staged installation ** libs "c:/rtools40/mingw64/bin/"g++ -std=gnu++11 -I"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-40~1.1/include" -DNDEBUG -I'C:/Users/micha/Documents/R/win-library/4.0/testthat/include' -O2 -Wall -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -mstackrealign -c clip-lines.cpp -o clip-lines.o /bin/sh: c:/rtools40/mingw64/bin/g++: No such file or directory make: *** [clip-lines.o] Error 127 ERROR: compilation failed for package 'isoband'
• removing 'C:/Users/micha/Documents/R/win-library/4.0/isoband' Warning in install.packages : installation of package ‘isoband’ had non-zero exit status ERROR: dependency 'isoband' is not available for package 'ggplot2'
• removing 'C:/Users/micha/Documents/R/win-library/4.0/ggplot2' Warning in install.packages : installation of package ‘ggplot2’ had non-zero exit status

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Is it an internal issue, or a problem with the packages? Should I contact the package maintainer for 'backports', 'isoband', 'ggplot2', re-install R and/or RStudio, or something else?

Answer 1

It seems that you run that on Windows and want to install learnr from the source (it means that you have to compile these packages). However, some packages need additional tools to compile on Windows. These tools are provided in official RTools for Windows, so install that first and try again.

And sometimes you can install the binary versions of the packages rather than the source. Then you don't need to compile:

install.packages("learnr", type = "binary")