Do not let pkg_deps() fail even when some dependencies are unavailable

[yutannihilation]

Since it might be the case for older versions of R. We are trying to switch GHA CI to use pak but because of this reason the CI won't run.

tidyverse/ggplot2#4425 (comment)

[gaborcsardi]

Are you sure you want to build the pkgdown site without those suggested packages? Why not just fix their installation?

[yutannihilation]

No, I meant check-pak action, not pkgdown-pak.

[yutannihilation]

Why not just fix their installation?

What I meant by "unavailable" is not that the CI fails to install the package, but some packages that specifies "R >= x.x" as "Depends" don't exist on the package index on the runner of older version of R, which is not what I can fix.

Currently, check-pak uses pkg_deps() and it fails on ggplot2 repo because some dependencies are literally unavailable.

https://github.com/r-lib/actions/blob/0d6c4b3efe82090bc03e99c585d9e89003117931/examples/check-pak.yaml#L57

If it's r-lib/action that I should file this issue, please let me know. I still don't see how this should be fixed.

[gaborcsardi]

Yeah, this will definitely need some support from pak, and I have some ideas on how to express this in DESCRIPTION or in an argument.

Unfortunately I don't have a simple workaround for now. You could temporarily remove the problematic dependencies when using pak, on the older R versions, with desc::desc_dep_dep() and desc::desc_set_dep(). Somewhat cumbersome, but it could work.

[yutannihilation]

Thanks, I'll try tweaking the CI scripts for now.

[gaborcsardi]

This is now possible with ?ignore and ?ignore-before-r: see some GHA oriented docs here-ish: https://github.com/r-lib/actions/tree/v2/setup-r-dependencies#ignoring-optional-dependencies-that-need-a-newer-r-version

On GHA you'll need to use the new v2 tag: https://github.com/r-lib/actions/releases/tag/v2

[yutannihilation]

Wow, great! Thanks!