Help provider not working with renv projects without required packages

[renkun-ken]

In renv projects, it is often a good practice only to include necessary packages. However, vscode-R help provider (e.g. getAliases.R) requires jsonlite to write the info. If the package is not installed in the renv project, then it won't work.

#1071 implements a vscode setting r.lsp.libPaths to support extra .libPaths() for the language server to start with. Maybe we should do similar in getAliases.R or eliminate the dependency on jsonlite?

[mcanouil]

Installing jsonlite or even languageserver causes no harm, since within a renv project only explicit use of packages (i.e., a call to library() or require()) are part of a default snapshot (i.e., renv.lock).

The only possible issue is to install them after a project was initialised and used with packages in different version than the ones required by languageserver. So, any R packages required/suggested for viscose-r should be install using renv::install("languageserver", upgrade = FALSE).

[renkun-ken]

What if languageserver requires something that has a version conflict with those installed in renv?

For example, if the project renv specifies an older version of a package but languageserver depends on a newer one?

[mcanouil]

In that case, you have a problem indeed.
Defining a new lib path in which you have the right to write/install new packages can help.

Then for this kind of edge cases and from a more general point of view, maybe vscode-r should rely on its own independent library path entirely 🤔
It could be a library path in the vscode-r directory in user's home.

[renkun-ken]

Closed via #1098.