Automatically normalizePath() for local type of references

[pawelru]

Given the following file structure:

my_packages/
├── pkg1
├── pkg2
├── pkg3
└── ...

I usually do:

setwd("my_packages/pkg1")

And then want to do the following:

pak::pak("../pkg2")

But it results in the following error:

Error: 
! error in pak subprocess
Caused by error in `get_remote_types(refs)`:
! Cannot parse package:
../pkg2.
ℹ See `?pkgdepends::pkg_refs()` for supported
  package sources.
Type .Last.error to see the more details.

The solution is to convert the path to be in absolute form via normalizePath(). This is definitely not the end of the world but involves a lot of typing given how short&sweet the pak::pak() command is.

My request is: can it be done automatically (for all local type of reference)?

[gaborcsardi]

Does

pak::pak("local::../pkg2")

work? The regex that recognizes local paths is intentionally conservative, to avoid ambiguity. E.g. foo/bar could be a local directory or a GH repo.

[pawelru]

Interestingly it does. That would mean that "../foo/bar" is not parsable. So the request would be to enhance regex to identify this as a file path

[gaborcsardi]

Btw. the ./ prefix is already a special case, so this should work as well:

pak::pak("./../pkg2")

I guess we can special case the ../ and ..\ prefixes as well.