installation of package 'tinytex' had non-zero exit status

Question

Very new at this so I am sorry if I have done something stupid or missed a step!

Running on windows 10 enterprise Version of R my company allows me to use is:

R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02) -- "Feather Spray" Copyright (C) 2018 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing

Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

Text from run is

install.packages('tinytex')

also installing the dependency 'xfun'
  There are binary versions available but the source versions are later:
        binary source needs_compilation
xfun      0.13   0.20              TRUE
tinytex   0.22   0.28             FALSE

  Binaries will be installed
trying URL 'https://cran.ms.unimelb.edu.au/bin/windows/contrib/3.5/xfun_0.13.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 184719 bytes (180 KB)
downloaded 180 KB

package 'xfun' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
        C:\Users\p1311516\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmpu0Onn4\downloaded_packages
installing the source package 'tinytex'

trying URL 'https://cran.ms.unimelb.edu.au/src/contrib/tinytex_0.28.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/octet-stream' length 27595 bytes (26 KB)
downloaded 26 KB

In R CMD INSTALL
* installing *source* package 'tinytex' ...
** package 'tinytex' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** R
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
Error in `loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :`
  namespace 'xfun' 0.13 is being loaded, but >= 0.19 is required
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'tinytex'
* removing 'C:/Program Files/R/R-3.5.1/library/tinytex'

The downloaded source packages are in
        'C:\Users\p1311516\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmpu0Onn4\downloaded_packages'
Warning message:
In install.packages("tinytex") :
  installation of package 'tinytex' had non-zero exit status

Answer 1

The issue is that R is trying to install the binary version of xfun which is version 0.13.

However, the tinytex package (version 0.22) requires version 0.19 or higher of xfun .

Given that you are stuck with an old version of R (3.5.1), it may be difficult to upgrade. You can try three things.

First, uninstall any installed versions of xfun and tinytex . Download Rtools 35 from this page and install it. Then install the packages from source:

install.packages(c("xfun", "tinytex"), type = "source")

If that doesn't work: you could try downloading the latest zipped Windows binaries from CRAN ( xfun and tinytex ) and installing from the files.

install.packages(file.choose(), repos = NULL)

which will launch a dialog for file selection. BUT this is quite likely not to work given your old R version.

The last option is to download old versions of the binaries for R 3.5.1 from the CRAN time machine . Here are direct links for xfun and tinytex . Download the zipped Windows binaries and install from files as described above.