Error while creating vignettes in 'oldrel' github action

[ElsLommelen]

The github action with the ubuntu 18.4 (oldrel) version always gives some errors concerning stringi during creation of the vignettes, which is not occurring in other OS (versions). If I remember well, similar stringi errors occurred in the protocolhelper package in this PR (@hansvancalster finally removed this oldrel github action to get rid of the error). Is there some link between them? Could this be a general problem or have something to do with the installation of the docker container?

Note: stringi is not a direct dependency of package inbodb, the closest I found, is that stringi is a dependency of glue.table, while glue is a dependency of inbodb.

I already checked if stringi would be a recent package, too recent to be installed on an old system, but it already exists several years in different versions, so there should certainly exist an older version that runs on older OS, if this would be the problem. When checking the installed version, I noticed that the most recent version of stringi is installed in the docker container. And this makes me wondering: why using an old OS to install the newest versions of R and the packages on it? As a package maintainer I would rather have my packages tested on older versions of R and older dependencies, to be sure it has some backward compatibility (e.g. up to the available versions at the latest update of R at INBO, or even older: the action can easily be dropped or 'updated' using yaml after specifying the versions of the dependencies in the package). In your setup you are rather testing if all dependencies are still compatible with the old OS, I guess, which seems to be less relevant for the package itself (unless it strongly depends on OS version related software).

[ThierryO]

Can you rerun the check? I've been able to install the latest version of stringi on a docker with Ubuntu 18.04

[ElsLommelen]

I did, and he passed this test now, so the problem is indeed solved. Thanks!