Copy of rstudio-cloud starts with different R version -> packages not installed

Posit Professional products Posit Cloud
1

I created an rstudio-cloud project, https://rstudio.cloud/project/39040, that allows users to test my RTutor package.

I created the project with R 3.44 (was the newest R version on rstudio cloud at that time). However, recently when other users used the link above and thus created a temporary copy of the project, the default version was the newest R version 3.5. (When I logged in myself, it was still R 3.4.4) Unfortunately, this had the effect that none of the packages that I had manually installed in my original cloud project was available by default in copies of the project and the project could not be used as expected.

I could fix the problem by changing my original project to R 3.5 and installing all packages again. Yet, at least for some time my project was broken.

I am not sure whether that behavior is desired or a bug. Personally, I think it would be much preferable, if a copy of a project, would by default have the same R version as the original project to guarantee that projects can be copied and used without errors. If there are reasons against making this the default behaviour, it would be at least great if one could set this behavior for copies by an option.

2

It is not desired behavior and we are tracking the issue but do not have guidance to give at this time as to when it will be fixed. I will add this post to the ticket so we will update it when we have more information.

3

I recently opened an RStudio Cloud project from Your Workspace that had been created when R 3.4.4 was the latest version, and it had also changed to R 3.5.0, with an empty user library. Is this the expected behavior, or part of the same issue? It definitely caught me by surprise!

4

That is surprising, @jcblum
We have only seen "automatic" changes for existing projects when they had no contents.

5

This one definitely had contents (it’s actually a sort of grab-bag project I’ve been using to test bits of code related to answering questions here). Since then I’m afraid I’ve messed with the project some (installed packages in the 3.5.0 user lib, switched back and forth between R versions a couple times out of curiosity), but if there’s any info I can provide that would be helpful I’m happy to do so.