use_dev_package tries to install from CRAN rather than the remote

[Moohan]

I created a package and initialised renv. I was using use_dev_package("funspotr") to add the {funspotr} package to the DESCRIPTION. No matter how I specified it e.g. even as: use_dev_package("funspotr", remote = "git::https://github.com/brshallo/funspotr.git") usethis would say the package wasn't installed and if I chose to install the package it would go to CRAN, where it obviously wouldn't find it and then would fail.

I think if use_dev_package is trying to install a package it should try and install it from remote, if remote isn't specified the user should be prompted to enter one.

[jennybc]

It's pretty unusual to use renv while developing a package and, unless you have a specific reason to do so, I wouldn't recommend it. It's certainly not a use case that has been explored or designed around much in terms of devtools/usethis.

I'm guessing you have not installed funspotr into the project-specific library for this new project?

[Moohan]

Yep exactly, it hadn't been installed into the project specific library.

Probably less likely but this issue could also occur outside of a renv context, if adding the package before installing it, which is surely the situation that the rlang::check_installed() is trying to catch... It just doesn't work when the package in question comes from a non-standard (CRAN) source.

[jennybc]

I feel like the message telling you that the package wasn't installed worked as intended here. devtools and usethis basically assume that when you are working on a package, you have all of its dependencies installed locally. I think it makes more sense for you to install brshallo/funspotr in the renv library specific to your package, then call use_dev_package() than for usethis to gain a lot of conditional code for this edge case.