Closing this issue because it is now probably circumvented:
gdalUtils is not longer a dependency (#61). The above issue has been delegated to gearslaboratory/gdalUtils#26.
Since some time, a safer installation method is recommended on the homepage, which sets an environment variable to make remotes::install_github() more friendly (#68).
At least two colleagues had success using this installation method in Windows (see e.g. here)
With one user, the following happened:
This can be remedied by a manual installation of
R.methodsS3
beforehand.However is there some more direct way to prevent this from happening?