[SPARK-28309][R][INFRA] Fix AppVeyor to run SparkR tests by avoiding to use devtools for testthat

[HyukjinKwon]

What changes were proposed in this pull request?

Looks devtools 2.1.0 is released and then our AppVeyor users the latest one.
The problem is, they added testthat 2.1.1+ as its dependency - https://github.com/r-lib/devtools/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L35

Usually it should remove and reinstall it properly when we install other packages; however, seems it's being failed in AppVeyor due to the previous installation for an unknown reason.

[00:01:41] > devtools::install_version('testthat', version = '1.0.2', repos='https://cloud.r-project.org/')
[00:01:44] Downloading package from url: https://cloud.r-project.org//src/contrib/Archive/testthat/testthat_1.0.2.tar.gz
...
[00:02:25] WARNING: moving package to final location failed, copying instead
[00:02:25] Warning in file.copy(instdir, dirname(final_instdir), recursive = TRUE,  :
[00:02:25]   problem copying c:\RLibrary\00LOCK-testthat\00new\testthat\libs\i386\testthat.dll to c:\RLibrary\testthat\libs\i386\testthat.dll: Permission denied
[00:02:25] ** testing if installed package can be loaded from final location
[00:02:25] *** arch - i386
[00:02:26] Error: package or namespace load failed for 'testthat' in FUN(X[[i]], ...):
[00:02:26]  no such symbol find_label_ in package c:/RLibrary/testthat/libs/i386/testthat.dll
[00:02:26] Error: loading failed
[00:02:26] Execution halted
[00:02:26] *** arch - x64
[00:02:26] ERROR: loading failed for 'i386'
[00:02:26] * removing 'c:/RLibrary/testthat'
[00:02:26] * restoring previous 'c:/RLibrary/testthat'
[00:02:26] Warning in file.copy(lp, dirname(pkgdir), recursive = TRUE, copy.date = TRUE) :
[00:02:26]   problem copying c:\RLibrary\00LOCK-testthat\testthat\libs\i386\testthat.dll to c:\RLibrary\testthat\libs\i386\testthat.dll: Permission denied
[00:02:26] Warning message:
[00:02:26] In i.p(...) :
[00:02:26]   installation of package 'C:/Users/appveyor/AppData/Local/Temp/1/RtmpIx25hi/remotes5743d4a9b1/testthat' had non-zero exit status

See https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/spark/builds/25818746

Our SparkR testbed requires testthat 1.0.2 at most for the current status and devtools was installed at SPARK-22817 to pin the testthat version to 1.0.2

Therefore, this PR works around the current issue by directly installing from the archive instead, and don't use devtools.

 R -e "install.packages('https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/testthat/testthat_1.0.2.tar.gz', repos=NULL, type='source')"

How was this patch tested?

AppVeyor will test.

[dongjoon-hyun]

Thank you so much for working on this, @HyukjinKwon !

[HyukjinKwon]

@felixcheung .. I think it's time to update our SparkR tests to use higher versions of testthat soon..

[dongjoon-hyun]

+1, LGTM.

[HyukjinKwon]

I am merging this. appveyor.yml doesn't affect anything in the PR builder's test run.

[HyukjinKwon]

Merged to master. Let me merge this one only to master for now. It's rather a temp fix.

Thanks, @dongjoon-hyun

[SparkQA]

Test build #107380 has finished for PR 25081 at commit 5b14e67.

• This patch passes all tests.
• This patch merges cleanly.
• This patch adds no public classes.

[felixcheung]

thanks!

definitely, it's a bit dated. I recalled trying to update it but the "new" testthat had changes to a method that we called into and so it broke that and I couldn't get it to work...

[HyukjinKwon]

Yea .. I couldn't get it to work too .. Maybe it might need a bigger change to adopt to newer testthat hm hm ..

[AceHack]

FYI, this readme no longer works either
http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/building-spark.html

Running R Tests
To run the SparkR tests you will need to install the knitr, rmarkdown, testthat, e1071 and survival packages first:

R -e "install.packages(c('knitr', 'rmarkdown', 'devtools', 'e1071', 'survival'), repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org')"
R -e "devtools::install_version('testthat', version = '1.0.2', repos='http://cran.us.r-project.org')"

[HyukjinKwon]

Can you file a JIRA with showing the console output?