drat fails on windows

[kvasilopoulos]

I am trying to include drat into my package and I am getting the following error msg in Windows-appveyor (https://ci.appveyor.com/project/kvasilopoulos/exuber/builds/31075466).

Installing packages into 'c:/RLibrary'
(as 'lib' is unspecified)
<error/rlang_error>
(converted from warning) unable to access index for repository https://kvasilopoulos.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.6:
  cannot open URL 'https://kvasilopoulos.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.6/PACKAGES

However, it works ok locally (windows os) and in winbuilder-release. I had included the following chunk in Description:

Suggests:exuberdata (>= 0.0.0.9004)
Additional_repositories: https://kvasilopoulos.github.io/drat

Please have a look at the dev branch:

package: https://github.com/kvasilopoulos/exuber/tree/dev
drat-repo: https://github.com/kvasilopoulos/drat/tree/gh-pages/src/contrib

Related issue https://github.com/eddelbuettel/drat/issues/82

Also it fails to install when I am using

install_github("kvasilopoulos/exuber@dev")

Does anyone have any insight on that?

Thanks!

[kvasilopoulos]

I found a fix. Basically, you have to create an empty PACKAGES file at

drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.6/PACKAGES

and then everything works perfectly. I don't know if this is the right way, but at least it works.