Build Issues with VE 3.1.1 under earlier R versions

[jrawbits]

The imminent release of VisionEval 3.1.1 will include installers for the three most recent R major versions. I'm working on these:

• R 4.1.3
• R 4.2.3
• R 4.3.2

R 4.1.3 does have an issue (and workaround) as follows:
- VELandUse Requires the viridis and viridisLite packages, which are not available in binary versions on CRAN
- Run the installer as far as it can go (it will crash building VELandUse)
- Open an R session with 4.1.3,
- install.packages(c("viridis","viridisLite"),lib="/path/to/ve-lib",type="source")
- Then you can re-start the installation and it will work
- If you're going to be redoing installations from scratch (i.e. with fresh ve-lib), you may want to edit build/scripts/build-velib.R and comment out line 23 (insert # at the beginning). Then the source installation will happen automatically if a binary package is not available. In general, you don't want to automatically build from source (particularly from the current R version) since it can lead to weirdly unstable combinations of packages, as it will often give you the "bleeding edge" source package instead of the slightly older but more stable binary package.

R 4.2.3 had a weird bug that prevented it from running Roxygen to build required documentation. Roxygen is used to do the standard R function documentation, but also to collate R source files and generate the NAMESPACE file. The build works fine under 4.3.2. I have been able to work around that issue by adding documentation and export to three logger functions (which should NOT need to be exported, and therefore should not need to be documented). I've made a commit to the VE source with updated documentation that does allow the build to take place. Fixed in commit #b82be80