Specify renv version in renv action

[boshek]

👋 thank you for maintaining this action. renv is such a useful tool and having this in place really completes the user experience.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Last week an renv version was shipped to CRAN that had a bug in it. The maintainer was very responsive and shipped a fixed version very quickly. However, I think that a broken CRAN version of renv makes this action unuseable because it has to install the latest version of renv from CRAN here.

So for example in this nightly job here when renv 1.0.6 turned out to be have a bug, we got this issue in CI: https://github.com/ursacomputing/crossbow/blob/cec652591e63edc8f1b1d096f30ca6ad3ff6bfef/.github/workflows/nightly_dashboard.yml#L60-L66

AFAIK, there is not a way with this action to say "please install renv version X" only (i.e. pin the first installation of renv itself).

Describe the solution you'd like
It would be nice, in situations where renv is broken on the latest CRAN to be able to provide an input to install an older version as a workaround for any GHA that depends on this. I am happy to contribute this so I am wondering if you would consider an optional input to install an older version of renv as an easier workaround for folks. The default would be latest on CRAN but one could at least revert back if needed. Maybe there is another way to accomplish this so apologies if I've missed that.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I did think whether setting the default repo to something like r-universe is a good workaround but to me reverting the version of renv is the solution that most people would first think about.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[gaborcsardi]

You forgot to link to a workflow and a workflow run where this is a problem.

[boshek]

thanks @gaborcsardi. updated.

[gaborcsardi]

If you run the action in the subdirectory that contains the .Rprofile file, then it will install the version that you specify in your renv.lock file, I believe.

[boshek]

OK thanks. So that is probably the preferred way then? Rather then have an input for version?

[gaborcsardi]

We can have an input, but in any case, the R version should be in renv.lock, and that is the one that should be installed by default.

This is already the case when you have the usual .Rprofile, created by renv, in the repo, but otherwise it is not.

[gaborcsardi]

Seems like we don't need to do anything here, so I am going to close this. Please reopen if you still have issues.

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