Devtools: Error at first installation with install_github

[kamapu]

I try to install a package form GitHub using devtools

library(devtools)
install_github("kamapu/spatialist")

and got an error message

Error in read.dcf(path) : 
Found continuation line starting '  person("Miguel", "A ...' at begin of record.

If I use CMD INSTALL or install_local(), the installation will work fine.

At the beginning I though, the problem is because the package has only one function, which may not be a common case, but I realized that this issue also appears with other packages when I install for the very first time, and not when updating installed packages.

May this be a bug?

[kamapu]

still having this problem within my colleagues...

[simongrund1]

Can confirm this. Fresh install after an update to 3.5.2 on Windows with no other external packages installed besides devtools. The full set of commands run right after the install were:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("stefvanbuuren/mice")

This gave the error:

Error in read.dcf(path) :
  Found continuation line starting '    email = "stef. va ...' at begin of record.

Note that this is a different package. It's also interesting that I was able to run the same command without problem on an older install of R version 3.5.1 (also on Windows).

[jennybc]

This error sounds a lot like: #1900 install_github() gives Error in read.dcf(path)

The resolution reached there is to update the remotes package, where this may have been fixed. The fix is currently only in the dev version, so you'd need to to devtools::install_github("r-lib/remotes").

[simongrund1]

This solves the problem for me. Specifically, I needed to:

1. Run devtools::install_github("r-lib/remotes")
2. Restart R.
3. Run devtools::install_github("...") for the intended package.

Doing this, all packages install as intended. Thanks for the quick feedback!

[jennybc]

OK great, so this is a duplicate of #1900.

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