SOLVED: Package "car" for R requires package "nloptr" which requires cmake in Ubuntu - please help?

[cfolmst14]

Hi all! I'm learning to make autograders for my R-based biostatistics course, and we use lme4+car syntax. When trying to add these packages to my gradescope autograder setup.sh, I get an error while building that results in car and it's dependencies all being removed, right before my autograder build finishes. This means all of the functions in the assignment that call car or lme4 don't work and crash the autograder when testing. I managed to get this screengrab showing the error that is underlying this (managed, because it kept jumping away and disappeared/couldn't ctrl+F it, by the time the build finished after the packages were removed):

When it finishes building, it leaves me with just this:

I am admittedly very new to any Linux-based work but self-teaching in R has made me a confident Googler and I've built three successful autograders so far this term - but I am at a loss to get cmake into Gradescope so I can load car and use. I have tried at least ten different install/update options (added as lines to my setup.sh file, before any of the r installation components), including following line-by-line from both kitware and snapcraft:
https://apt.kitware.com/
https://snapcraft.io/install/cmake/ubuntu

I suspect there is either a) something that I'm missing that will be very obvious to a more experienced user or b) that cmake is not supported or loadable on the version of Ubuntu that autograder runs on, and I'm wasting my time. (I've been doing everything in the default Ubuntu 22.04 Base, if that matters).

Any help you could provide to help me figure out how to get cmake into my autograder so we can use car would be greatly, greatly appreciated! Any alternative band-aid solutions for this term would be welcome too.

[cfolmst14]

Got it fixed with some help from GitHub Copilot (no quick responses from humans on any of the forums I tried, and no google luck - I guess this is a pretty specific problem)! I needed to add -y to the lines from kitware, right after every instance of apt-get but before install, update, etc.

From watching the flawed build closely a half-dozen times, I gather that the Gradescope docker default-aborts when trying to install CMake instead of letting us enter y/n as needed for space-related questions, but those errors disappear by the end of the build if you're not watching it live, so passing an anticipatory -y seems to matter a lot! I also increased the base size in the assignment settings as part of an earlier attempt after seeing hints of that space-related abort, but I'm genuinely unsure if that mattered or not - it's working now, so I don't want to break it to find out. For reference, nothing in here resulted in a build error at any point - just an inability to recognize car functions and the warning in the second screenshot above.

Definitely seems like I had a total beginner problem, but I wanted to share my solution in case it helps any other car/lme4 Rstats folks dipping their toes in the autograder world! Big shoutout to @tbrown122387's gradeR examples for giving me a great starting place to work from. So far, this has been an awesome way to help my beginner R students get more careful about proofreading their code and has really cut down on human-hours spot-checking for very important functions - I look forward to seeing how we develop together throughout this semester.

[tbrown122387]

Yeah -y is essential because there’s no chance for manual intervention. Nice. And sorry, I didn’t see the thread until you @‘d me