Package Installation Fail

[mackerman44]

Today, I attempted to install telemetyr on my new machine.

library(devtools)
install_github("BiomarkABS/telemetyr", build_vignettes = T)

Unfortunately, the first attempt failed because rjags was not installed. Then, after installing rjags the second attempt failed with:

E> The rjags package is just an interface to the JAGS library
E> Make sure you have installed JAGS-4.x.y.exe (for any x >=0, y>=0) from
E> http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/mcmc-jags/files

After downloading and installing JAGS the install worked fine.

Is this the intended or expected response? I need to remind myself, but wasn't jagsUI added (or something to that effect) to remove the need for JAGS. Not high priority, just ran into this when getting telemetyr on the new machine.

[KevinSee]

I think the issue may be that the rjags package tries to link to the JAGS software, and throws an error if it is not installed. Since rjags is not required by any of the vignettes, maybe we should consider removing it from the Suggests list, so R won't try to install it when installing telemetyr. We should find a computer that does not have JAGS installed to test that fix on.

[KevinSee]

OK, small problem with my comment above: we wrote several functions to run a JAGS model into the package, which require rjags, so we should keep it in the DESCRIPTION. Maybe just better installation instructions on the README file, explaining that a user should install JAGS first, and how to do so.