renv / install.packages ignore requested repo

[cportner]

arrow currently has an issue when the Mac version has heavily restricted capabilities. The recommended solution is to download from https://apache.r-universe.dev. However, if I use

install.packages("arrow", repos = "https://apache.r-universe.dev")

from within a renv-enabled project, install.packages keeps using the cran version. This persisted after deleting the package and using renv::purge("arrow"). The only way I could finally get the r-universe version installed was to close the project, install arrow when renv was not loaded, and then go back to the project and install arrow again.

The expected behavior is that renv honors a requested repo.

[kevinushey]

I'm not able to reproduce:

> renv::install("arrow", repos = c(apache = "https://apache.r-universe.dev"))
# Downloading packages -------------------------------------------------------
- Downloading arrow from apache ...             OK [file is up to date]
Successfully downloaded 1 package in 1.3 seconds.

The following package(s) will be installed:
- arrow [15.0.1]
These packages will be installed into "~/Library/R/arm64/4.3/library".

Can you provide more details?

[cportner]

I think I see what is going on. The manual makes it seem like you can simply provide the URL for the repo, but that does not appear to be enough. Not sure if this is specific to r-universe, but it is not very transparent what you need to do.

When I do not specify the repos as a vector with apache = URL package installation reverts to cran.

However, if I specify "apache = URL" it does load it from r-universe:

If the problem is that I am trying to load from a subdomain (apache in this case), would it not make sense for renv and install packages to infer that this is, in fact, the domain I want to use?