I personally always work on Linux so never have problems with source only packages, but but my students work on Macs and Windows and they are rarely (never) set up to compile the source. However, they nearly always get a message about there being a source only package more recent than a binary package, but it either automatically goes to binary install or it asks would they like binary or source.
However, it appears that two students today, one on MacOS and one on Windows, when installing tidyverse, it immediately tried to install callr, clipr, and cli from source. No prompts. And that failed and lend to non-zero exit status warnings for those packages.
I have tried to reproduce this behaviour on Windows but can not.
I set this option
options(pkgType = "source")
and everything was attempted to be installed from source and so failed to install (on Windows without RTools). That's as expected. But what happened to the students was that it installed binaries except for three packages with new source only versions.
I then tried (leaving pkgType as both)
options(install.packages.compile.from.source = "always")
That did not prompt if I wanted source or binary. It simply stated that newer sources were available but went to binary anyway.
Ultimately, I just want to inform the students about how to skip using the source, but I can't see why they are not given options to choose the latest binary.
Is there another setting that relates to this?