GH-50603: [R] remove assertthat dependency + improve error messages

[olivroy]

Rationale for this change

To get rid of assertthat dependency, and use more rlang in error handling. fix #50603

What changes are included in this PR?

• removing assertthat dependency (replaced by rlang's type checkers)
• adding rlang type checkers standalone files.

Maybe assert_is() could be renamed check_class()?

Are these changes tested?

By existing tests.

Are there any user-facing changes?

No, only error messages standardized.

• GitHub Issue: [R] Remove assertthat dependency and improve error messages #50603

[github-actions]

Thanks for opening a pull request!

If this is not a minor PR. Could you open an issue for this pull request on GitHub? https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/new/choose

Opening GitHub issues ahead of time contributes to the Openness of the Apache Arrow project.

Then could you also rename the pull request title in the following format?

GH-${GITHUB_ISSUE_ID}: [${COMPONENT}] ${SUMMARY}

or

MINOR: [${COMPONENT}] ${SUMMARY}

See also:

• Other pull requests
• Contribution Guidelines - Contributing Overview

[thisisnic]

Thanks for the PR @olivroy! Can you expand more about trying to get the dev version working locally - what have you tried and what errors are you getting? It'll be easier if we help you with that first, as building iteratively on CI burns through a lot of machine time and is a really frustrating process as you wait for the builds to complete which takes much longer than just running devtools::test() once your setup is working.

[thisisnic]

*** Unable to retrieve libarrow for version 25.0.0.9000 (windows-x86_64)

Thanks, that's helpful! It looks like there's an issue with our nightly C++ builds, so actually while we're fixing that then we can probably only easily build on CI so that's fine for now. This is super useful to know though, will have a look at getting it fixed.

Once it is fixed, I think that setting the ARROW_R_DEV environment variable to TRUE will enabled you to use the nightly builds easily: Sys.setenv(ARROW_R_DEV = "true")

[olivroy]

Oh, this is great! Thanks for investigating and finding a fix! This will be useful in the future.

Hopefully, I got everything corrected this time

[olivroy]

I guess this would be ready for review. I am now able to build arrow locally!

• I finalized removing the assertthat dependency and refactored assert_is() to use rlang instead.

Edit: lints corrected now!

[kou]

Could you open a new issue for this?
See the #50525 (comment) comment for details.

[olivroy]

Everything done now! The last failure was caused by an oversight on my end.

[github-actions]

⚠️ GitHub issue #50603 has been automatically assigned in GitHub to PR creator.

[olivroy]

apologies, I still have an old RStudio (without air), but I ran lintr::lint_package() and found no outstanding issues. the full lintr output didn’t show in previous CI runs…

[thisisnic]

Thanks for this PR @olivroy

One thing to note - with changes like this, it's usually better to open an issue first to discuss with maintainers to see folks agree with the need for the change. No big deal here, just could save time/effort if we don't go ahead with it in the end.

Can you explain more about the reasoning for these changes here? This PR removes a dependency, but overall adds ~200 lines of code to the codebase, which is more code for us to maintain, so I'm not sure it's an improvement, but could be convinced otherwise.

[thisisnic]

Would you mind explaining more about this - why copy them not import them, and what do you mean by not licensed?