Can't install CRAN packages from source - fails with no error message

[znmeb]

This is on 64=bit R for Windows GUI, not in RStudio. It also fails in RStudio and fails for packages besides jsonlite but this is the simplest case I can reproduce.

R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01) -- "Bird Hippie"
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Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

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> Sys.which("make")
                              make 
"C:\\rtools40\\usr\\bin\\make.exe" 
> Sys.getenv("RTOOLS40_HOME")
[1] "C:\\rtools40"
> install.packages("jsonlite", type = "source")
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/znmeb/R/win-library/4.1’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
trying URL 'https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/jsonlite_1.7.2.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 421716 bytes (411 KB)
downloaded 411 KB

The downloaded source packages are in
        ‘C:\Users\znmeb\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpG2umGc\downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("jsonlite", type = "source") :
  installation of package ‘jsonlite’ had non-zero exit status
> 

Here's "~/.Renviron"

PATH="${RTOOLS40_HOME}\usr\bin;${PATH}"

There's no error message, even if I use verbose = TRUE and keep_outputs = TRUE.

[jeroen]

Is maybe your home directory unwriteable? C:/Users/znmeb/R/win-library/4.1 ? Does installing the binary package work?

[znmeb]

The home library is writeable and binary packages work. This is a new phenomenon; I'm sure it's some kind of screwed-up environment / PATH problem that would be obvious if the install logs were available. Is there any way to force them? "verbose" and "keep_outputs" either isn't working or it's putting the logs somewhere obscure.

[znmeb]

I have it working finally. It looks like what was happening is that "cmd.exe" was corrupted or one of its dependencies was missing. I couldn't even start "cmd.exe" from the Start menu. I had to reset the PC from the recovery menu to get that fixed. Once I got that fixed I could install jsonlite from source.