RDNA nod of appreciation to the `pak` library for R.
I don't use #RStats much anymore (because #Julia), but just wanted to test something that required installing devtools--and of course my current system was missing some of the system libraries that devtools depends on. `install.packages` makes it difficult to figure out what's missing, but `pak` provides much better documentation, including of missing dependencies.
Another Approach to Package Installation
The goal of pak is to make package installation faster and more reliable. In particular, it performs all HTTP operations in parallel, so metadata resolution and package downloads are fast. Metadata and package files are cached on the local disk as well. pak has a dependency solver, so it finds version conflicts before performing the installation. This version of pak supports CRAN, Bioconductor and GitHub packages as well.