Well, on the positive side, it seems to be a fairly limited bug. :)
You have to actually have a syntax error in your DESCRIPTION file, and
it needs to be in one of the fields passed to parse_description_field()
as defined in tools:::.install_packages(); which is only Biarch,
LazyData, ByteCompile,
> Aaron Wells
> on Fri, 24 Nov 2017 12:46:48 +1300 writes:
> Hi, I think I've found a bug in R CMD INSTALL. When it tries to parse a
> DESCRIPTION file with an invalid LazyData field, it errors out while
> trying to print the correct error message:
>> R CMD INSTALL .
