packrat (renv) dependency lookup inadvertently ignores projects in directories prefixed with `/data/`.

[jimhester]

We have a situation where our system temp directory is actually a symlink to /data/tmp, and the renv default exclusion rules cause all inferred packages to be ignored when trying to deploy content to RStudio Connect.

While in our case /data is the first directory after the root, it seems this will happen if a directory is called data anywhere in the tree. I think ideally these exclusions would match only child directories of the project root. This should be a relatively minimal example.

dir.create("data/foo", recursive = TRUE)
writeLines("library(glue)", "data/foo/test.R")
options(renv.renvignore.exclude = packrat:::ignoresForRenv(packrat:::opts$ignored.directories()))
path <- normalizePath("data/foo")
packrat:::renv$dependencies(path, root = path)
#> Finding R package dependencies ... Done!
#> [1] Source  Package Require Version Dev    
#> <0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

^{Created on 2022-08-11 by the reprex package (v2.0.1)}

cc @aronatkins, who I believe added this code in https://github.com/rstudio/packrat/pull/647

A workaround for us is to set options(packrat.dependency.discovery.renv = FALSE), but ideally users wouldn't need to resort to this :)

[aronatkins]

Thanks for filing this.

Our intent is to do as you describe - ignore data only as a child of the project root. I'm guessing that something is treating the current directory as the project root rather than root, but we'll need to dig in to be sure.

[kevinushey]

Part of the reason is probably the asis = TRUE here:

https://github.com/rstudio/packrat/blob/28e4a1e0ddb87c6e206c1c73c0f3807b0d09a967/R/dependencies.R#L145

Compare e.g.

> options(renv.renvignore.exclude = c("/data/"))
> renv:::renv_renvignore_pattern_extra("exclude", "/root")
[1] "^\\Q/root/\\E\\Qdata/\\E$"
> 
> options(renv.renvignore.exclude = structure("/data/", asis = TRUE))
> renv:::renv_renvignore_pattern_extra("exclude", "/root")
[1] "/data/"
attr(,"asis")
[1] TRUE

I think we had some motivation to use asis = TRUE here but I don't recall the details...

[aronatkins]

Capturing more history:

The "asis" support was added to renv here: https://github.com/rstudio/renv/pull/866

> packrat::opts$ignored.directories()
[1] "data" "inst"

The intent was to rewrite the Packrat set of ignored directories into renv-equivalents so they would apply only at the project root. The "asis" attribute was meant to avoid any parsing of the rule by renv.

The filtering in Packrat (given a recursive list.files): https://github.com/rstudio/packrat/blob/28e4a1e0ddb87c6e206c1c73c0f3807b0d09a967/R/dependencies.R#L203-L223