[Dev] Pre-commit fails if R is not installed

[WillAyd]

Describe the bug, including details regarding any error messages, version, and platform.

I believe #46581 introduced a bug where if a developer does not have R installed on their system, the pre-commit check will fail with an exception like:

[INFO] Installing environment for local.
[INFO] Once installed this environment will be reused.
[INFO] This may take a few minutes...
An unexpected error has occurred: CalledProcessError: command: ('Rscript', '--vanilla', '/tmp/tmp6h7jqkbh/script.R')
return code: 1
stdout:
    Executable `Rscript` not found

Component(s)

Developer Tools

[WillAyd]

I believe there are some R pre-commit hooks at https://github.com/lorenzwalthert/precommit - can these be used instead of a local hook?

[kou]

It's an expected behavior.
If you don't want to require R, could you use pre-commit run --show-diff-on-failure --color=always --all-files cpp or something? (The last cpp is the important part. See also #46602.)

I believe there are some R pre-commit hooks at https://github.com/lorenzwalthert/precommit - can these be used instead of a local hook?

It also uses local R. (We can't use it because it doesn't install cyclocomp. See also the PR description in #46581.)

[WillAyd]

Trying this out on a new system, once R is installed you also need to be sure to install libxml2-dev to make pre-commit rules for R happy, and then need to install ruby-dev for subsequent rules

[amoeba]

I understand @WillAyd's perspective here. It'd be nice if all checks were entirely self-bootstrapped.

Imagine I'm a contributer who wants to contribute a PyArrow documentation change and I want to use pre-commit to make sure my change is well-formatted. I do this,

1. Check out arrow and cd into the checkout
2. Install pre-commit (like with apt or brew)
3. Run pre-commit install
4. Edit the .py file I want
5. git add and commit the file

At this point, I'll run into the errors @WillAyd reported (no Rscript, no ruby, no ruby dev headers). This is a bit of a disincentive for contributors to use pre-commit.

The R situation can be fully or partially resolved by migrating to Air but I'm not sure about the Ruby bit.

Is the best we can do right now just to document this?

[thisisnic]

I tracked the source of the problem down in #47937 after facing a similar issue.

I agree with @amoeba that we should document this, and not suggest that new contributors use pre-commit if we can't configure it to not need everything.

[jorisvandenbossche]

It would be nice to find a better solution for this, because IMO we should definitely be able to recommend contributors ot use pre-commit, but the current failures are quite confusing and annoying (even for a not-new contributor ;))

(and even when R is installed, there is still the issue from #47997)

[amoeba]

I wonder if we could replace our use of lintr with jarl which is a new R linter that has a Python-based pre-commit hook: https://github.com/etiennebacher/jarl-pre-commit. I'm not sure if it's a drop-in replacement yet. But if so, we could drop the R requirement entirely from the pre-commit setup. @thisisnic what do you think?

PS: I filed #49701 to simplify the other R pre-commit check a bit.