Help diagnosing a problem installing tidyverse and updating any package

[larryfeltonj]

I posted the basics of my problem as a "me too" response to someone with a similar problem.

tidyverse disappeared from my packages, and any attempts to install just die with no meaningful error message.

First, here is the output of my sessionInfo() to let you know my system:

sessionInfo()
R version 4.0.4 (2021-02-15)
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Fedora 33 (Workstation Edition)

Matrix products: default
BLAS/LAPACK: /usr/lib64/libflexiblas.so.3.0

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices datasets utils methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] htmlwidgets_1.5.3 colorspace_2.0-0 scales_1.1.1 compiler_4.0.4
[5] magrittr_2.0.1 R6_2.5.0 leaflet_2.0.4.1 htmltools_0.5.1.1
[9] tools_4.0.4 crosstalk_1.1.1 digest_0.6.27 lifecycle_1.0.0
[13] munsell_0.5.0 rlang_0.4.10 CoprManager_0.3.7.1

Here is the output of my attempt to install tidyverse:

install.packages("tidyverse")
Install system packages...

Attempts to use the package update under tools has a similar failure.

One of the suggestions I saw in reply to a similar help request said try to change repositories. That had no effect.

Also, running the commands in the command line version of R gets the same failure with lack of feedback.

How should I begin diagnosing this? I'm going to continue searching both the topics here and do other web searches, but a starting point for diagnosing the problem is something I lack right now.

[larryfeltonj]

Well, with a bit of guidance from the R help mailing list I managed to solve the problem, although it doesn't tell me why it happened.

My solution was (suggested by one of the list members there) was to remove and reinstall each of the packages tidyverse complained about one at a time. The Tools-> update selection on RStudio seemed to be silently failing for me. But removing and installing worked.