NOTE on Missing Tidy package causing Ubuntu jobs to fail

[bburns632]

I requested a fix in rhub here (r-hub/rhub-linux-builders#71).

Looking at putting in a short term work around for now via r-hub/rhub#548

[jameslamb]

Thanks @bburns632 !

I think r-hub/rhub-linux-builders may be abandoned. Haven't seen that officially anywhere, but it seems like this repo has the same design goals and the same people are working on it: https://github.com/r-hub/containers

While r-hub/rhub-linux-builders hasn't had a new commit in 6+ months.

And looks like the ubuntu images from there come with tidy 😁

https://github.com/r-hub/containers/blob/a559d410624ccd2b0cfabf597517a4f48e352ba9/containers/ubuntu-clang/Dockerfile#L100

[bburns632]

@jameslamb , saw that staleness but figured one liner was worth it to confirm. R-hub's response confirmed those images are deprecated.

A small two line patch to our github actions workflow patches our issue but now I'm curious on where the ubuntu-latest image (that we use) is coming from. Note that ubuntu-latest is not on the list of supported images: https://r-hub.github.io/containers/.

Should we switch to ubuntu-next?

[jameslamb]

The only uses I see in this repo of "ubuntu-latest" refer to GitHub Actions virtual machine images, not container images.

pkgnet/.github/workflows/ci.yml

Line 20 in 9354e79

- os: ubuntu-latest

pkgnet/.github/workflows/smoke-tests.yaml

Line 15 in 9354e79

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Those are defined here: https://github.com/actions/runner-images

There is no ubuntu-next there.

[jameslamb]

So right now, here in pkgnet we aren't actually using container images at all.

We're asking GItHub Actions for an Ubuntu VM, and then setting up R with these GitHub Actions (Javascript code that downloads and installs R):

pkgnet/.github/workflows/ci.yml

Lines 29 to 34 in 9354e79

	- name: set up R
	uses: r-lib/actions/setup-r@v2
	with:
	r-version: ${{ matrix.r-version }}
	- uses: r-lib/actions/setup-pandoc@v2
	- uses: r-lib/actions/setup-tinytex@v2

It'd probably be a good idea to update to later versions of those if they exist. You can check at https://github.com/r-lib/actions

[bburns632]

Alternatively, couldn't we leverage r-hub's Ubuntu R images that have these steps already built into the image?

https://r-hub.github.io/containers/gha.html#for-your-own-package

[jameslamb]

Yeah totally! Switching to those container images would be better.

That'd make it easier to replicate CI locally, and it'd protect us from conflicts caused by the HUGE amount of stuff that GitHub pre-installs in its VM images (https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/main/images/ubuntu/Ubuntu2204-Readme.md).

I totally support that change. We did that a while ago over in LightGBM and it's been great: microsoft/LightGBM#5638

[bburns632]

@jameslamb which container from rhub would we use to replicate the MacOS compatibility testing we do now? That's unclear to me.

[jameslamb]

You couldn't use container images for that. macOS would have to continue to run on a macos-latest virtual machine from GitHub Actions.