R devtools::release() Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection

Using devtools::release() to release a package I have a problem with the section that uses devtools::check() to make sure the package builds correctly.

Using the package code hosted on gihtub at https://github.com/RobWHickman/ggparliament. Had the same error on a variety of windows machines. Haven't had the chance to check on linux yet.

The error I get after passing the spelling check section of devtools::release is (the package name is ggparliament, the paths themselves have been edited here but are correct):

Is documentation free of spelling errors? (you can ignore false positives)
1: Yes
2: No way
3: Nope

Selection: 1
Building and checking ggparliament ==================================================================================================

Updating ggparliament documentation

Loading ggparliament

Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection

In addition: Warning messages:

1: In normalizePath(path.expand(path), winslash, mustWork) :
  path[11]="C:\Users\my\path\ggparliament/R/draw_majoritythreshold.R    ": The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

2: In normalizePath(path.expand(path), winslash, mustWork) :
  path[11]="C:\Users\my\path\ggparliament\R\draw_majoritythreshold.R    ": The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

3: In file(con, "r") :
  cannot open file 'C:\Users\my\path\ggparliament\R': Permission denied

As I mentioned, when checking the package with devtools::check() I got the same error, though it worked if I used the rstudio shortcut Ctrl+Shift+E which I believe does the same thing.

Any help much appreciated!

Solution

When I tried checking your package using devtools::check(),¹ I ran into the same error. After using debug(devtools::check), I was able to determine the error came when check() called document(), and then in turn that the error from document() was caused when it called roxygenise(). It appears there was a bug in roxygen2 that was fixed by this pull request (you can see the related issue here). After I installed the development version of roxygen2 via

devtools::install_github("klutometis/roxygen")

I no longer got that error from running devtools::check(); it appeared that the documentation was proceeding correctly. However, once it started to create the vignettes, I got a different error:

* creating vignettes ... ERROR
Quitting from lines 43-60 (arrange_parliament_8.Rmd) 
Error: processing vignette 'arrange_parliament_8.Rmd' failed with diagnostics:
Evaluation error: argument "x" is missing, with no default.

So you may need to check through your vignettes, though it seems to be an unrelated issue.

_{1. Your question notes you haven't been able to try on a Linux system. My attempts were on a computer running Ubuntu 16.04.}