In trying to install my own package from GitHub I hit a problem that others have notified me about and I'd tried unsuccessfully to fix. I conclude that the package installer misinforms the user about the problem source, leading to fruitless searching for faults in working scripts.
install_github("SimonDedman/gbm.auto", force = TRUE)
(Screenshot so it lines up properly)
Bill Dunlap has now provided a patch proposal on the R bugzilla (R's issue tracker), mentioned above: bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17859#c4 and we (R Core) are looking into it. It is true that parsing all source files separately is more expensive, notably only for packages that are "pure R" (no compilation) and also don't do other expensive things. Still, we agree the package developer should get a more useful error in such cases, and we also agree that syntactically the R/*.R source files should be self contained (i.e., not opening a brace in one file and closing it in a following one !!)