How do I troubleshoot devtools

Question

Out of the blue my devtools package will not work. Here is what I get. I have tried numerous fixes on my Windows 8 machine. I have reinstalled Rtools, I have reinstalled devtools but I keep getting the follwoing

require(devtools)


Loading required package: devtools
Error in namespaceExport(ns, exports) : 
undefined exports: iteratelist, rowSplit, whisker.escape, whisker.render

Where do I begin?

Winston Chang over on the devtools github said, "Strange, those errors involve the whisker package." So at his behest I am providing some additional information.

> packageVersion('whisker')
[1] ‘0.3.2’
> packageVersion('devtools')
[1] ‘1.3’
> sessionInfo() 
R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

Answer 1

I found a solution. I deleted the whisker folder in ~My Documents\R\win-library\3.0\ and reinstalled the package. Everything worked.

Thanks to Winston Chang who made me realize that my devtools problems were coming from the whisker package which I believe devtools relies on. Thank you to @DWin who gave me the idea of chucking out a malfunctioning library and reinstalling the library.

It was when I issued library(whisker) that I realized the problem may not be with devtools at all but rather with whisker

> library(whisker)
Error in namespaceExport(ns, exports) : 
  undefined exports: iteratelist, rowSplit, whisker.escape, whisker.render
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘whisker’

I can now load devtools and whisker.

It is odd. I would have thought that my packages would have been reinstalled when I uninstalled R and reinstalled it (one of the desperate steps I took when I was trying to troubleshoot). Evidently ~My Documents\R\win-library\3.0\whisker survived the uninstallation. Clearly I need to learn more about R installation and the ways in which the libraries can be setup.

Answer 2

My guess, in the absence of complete information and a log file for a command line installation, is that you have a corrupt .RData file. The .Rhistory file might alos be a source of corrupted data that results in incomprehensible error messages. (They are invisible to the average R user on both Windows and Mac file browsers.) Windows Explorer let's you choose to show hidden files. In WinXP one of the choices off the "Folder Options" dialog is the "View" panel. Delete first the .Rdata file and if that doesn't work then also delete the .Rhistory file.

My guess was wrong, so if RTools is available then:

install.packages("RGoogleDocs", 
                 repos="http://www.omegahat.org/R", type="source")