R packages & the `renv` library manager

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For anyone that finds this in the future, as far as I can tell the only way around this is to use buildFHSUserEnv (the following is what I needed for one of my projects, different projects will need different dependencies):

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
    utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, utils }:
    utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };
      in {
        devShell = (pkgs.buildFHSUserEnv {
          name = "2542";
          targetPkgs = pkgs:
            (with pkgs; [
              binutils
              cargo
              curl.dev
              gcc
              libgit2
              libxml2.dev
              openssl.dev
              pandoc
              pkg-config
              R
              rPackages.renv
              rustc
              zlib.dev
            ]);
        }).env;
      });
}

The only thing (that I’ve tried) that fails with this is devtools::check(), but even that works if you set vignettes = FALSE (i.e. devtools::check(vignettes = F)).

I wonder if it’s possible to create some kind of renv2nix project so that this just works, but I don’t know renv’s (or in fact R’s) internals well enough.

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