[ci] fail R macOS CI jobs earlier when installations fail

[jameslamb]

#5128 describes an issue where:

• brew install of a required dependency fails
• the CI job does not fail
• building LightGBM, running tests, etc. all happen
• a much later step (R CMD check for the R package) fails, because it's missing that dependency from Homebrew

This PR proposes adding some exit -1 calls to the main CI script for for R-package jobs, so that those jobs will fail earlier when such issues occur in the future.

Benefits of this:

• less work required to find the root cause of issues (since the problem will be near the end of logs)
• jobs will exit sooner, meaning less time occupying a spot in the repo's limited GitHub Actions queue (https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/usage-limits-billing-and-administration#usage-limits)

[jameslamb]

Going to move this back to "draft" while investigating the latest error

installer: Error - the package path specified was invalid: '/Users/runner/work/LightGBM/LightGBM/R.pkg'.
Error: Process completed with exit code 255.

But hey, at least in https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/runs/5826439843?check_suite_focus=true, basictex was installed successfully, so maybe #5128 is fixed!

[jameslamb]

😱 it looks like the R.pkg we were installing was removed!

curl -I https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/R-4.1.2.pkg

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2022 01:51:31 GMT
Server: Apache
Vary: accept-language,accept-charset
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Language: en

But because there was no || exit -1 on the line installing it, CI jobs didn't fail.

LightGBM/.ci/test_r_package.sh

Line 79 in d811f3a

curl -sL https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/R-${R_MAC_VERSION}.pkg -o R.pkg

And those jobs just silently fell back to the R version already available from GitHub Actions (https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/blob/main/images/macos/macos-11-Readme.md).

For example, look at this r-package (macOS-10.15, clang, R 4.1, cmake) job from two days ago: https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/runs/5800165206?check_suite_focus=true

R installation failed:

installer: Error - the package path specified was invalid: '/Users/runner/work/LightGBM/LightGBM/R.pkg'.

But the job continued, and you can see that the job used R 4.1.3, the version installed by default by GitHub Actions for this runner (link).

* using R version 4.1.3 (2022-03-10)

Pushed 43d60f6, targeting https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/base/ for R 4.x builds so this doesn't happen again.

[StrikerRUS]

yikes!

Thanks for fixing this!

Can this error be related to #4990?

[jameslamb]

Can this error be related to #4990?

ah!!! I bet you're right! I can try that later (updating those jobs to macOS-latest). I think it's very very likely that they're related.

[github-actions]

This pull request has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity since it was closed. To start a new related discussion, open a new issue at https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/issues including a reference to this.