Incorrect handling of force = FALSE when installing multiple packages using p_install

[r-cheologist]

Consider the following:

1. Pacman isn't present:

    > "pacman" %in% installed.packages()
    [1] FALSE
   

2. Neither is dplyr:

   > "dplyr" %in% installed.packages()      
   [1] FALSE
   

3. Install pacman:

   > install.packages("pacman")
   ...
   * installing *source* package ‘pacman’ ...
   * DONE (pacman)
   

4. Try reinstall using force = FALSE - correctly refuses to install ...

   > pacman::p_install("pacman", force = FALSE)
   Package is already on your system.
   

5. BUT when including the reinstall in a multiple-package install, it's reinstalled:

   > pacman::p_install(c("pacman", "dplyr"), force = FALSE)
   ...
   * installing *source* package ‘pacman’
   ...
   

I consider this a bug. the vector of names of packages to be installed should be checked against presence first and then the installation action should run using the uninstalled subset.

[trinker]

Thanks for the feedback. We'll look at this.

[seb-mueller]

Has this issue been resolved? I stopped using pacman a while ago because of this bug but would if give it another go if this is handled correctly now.

[burgerga]

Can confirm, also the documentation is outdated, as it still describes character.only being applicable to ... and not to package.

PS I'm looking for a p_load alternative that doesn't load the packages (for use in https://github.com/ropensci/targets), and I was expecting p_install to be just that, but now I need to use something like:

p_load(tidyverse)
c("biglm", "dplyr", "ggplot2", "readr", "targets", "tidyr") %>% 
  walk(p_install, force = F, character.only = T) %>% 
  suppressMessages()