update_packages() intermittently fails with cryptic error when GitHub servers have problems

[jonathan-g]

I can't create a reprex because this depends on how GitHub responds to requests, but this morning, I was getting a lot of unicorns on GitHub in my browser and at the same time update_packages() (run interactively from the RStudio console) was intermittently throwing errors

Error: JSON: EXPECTED value GOT <

It took me a while to figure out what might be doing this, and I am still not certain, but my suspicion is that when update_packages() queries GitHub and then gets an error code (e.g., 503) with an HTML payload instead of the expected 200 code and a JSON payload, the JSON parser fails.

Maybe this could be addressed by inspecting the return code and throwing a more user-friendly error message if the https request returns an error code.

[jimhester]

Yes, that is what is happening it is a known issue. as such I am going to close this particular issue.