Possibly more informative messaging with build errors and caching?

[steffilazerte]

I'm reporting an 'issue', but I'm not sure if it needs to be fixed or not as it is mostly just something I needed to learn.

I ran pkgcheck(), and it reported that "R CMD check process failed with message: 'Build process failed'." Eventually I figured out that this was because a required package wasn't installed on my system (I'm not sure if it's possible/necessary to make this error message a bit more informative?).

So I installed the package and then it took me a stupid amount of time to figure out why the build was still failing (i.e., because the default use_cache = TRUE wasn't rerunning the build check).

So I was able to figure everything out, and it was (in the end) an easy fix. But the combination of an unhelpful error message with the cache option made it a bit opaque for me.

I was wondering if it'd be possible (and desirable) to have some more informative errors or alerts for the user? Or perhaps just worth adding to the documentation? Or perhaps this is fine, as it's probably not common that people will use pkgcheck on R packages before testing the build status locally (which was my problem).

Feel free to close the issue if you think the latter!