Recursive package building fails for certain constellations

[jankowtf]

I might have overlooked some "clean up" switch in devtools::build(), but as far as I can tell, the directory that is automatically created when building a Windows binary causes trouble in subsequent build processes once a binary-build is followed by a source-build.

Here's the walk through:

1. Create an empty package project in RStudio called devtools.issue
2. Build the package using the following code:

Create repositories

repos_vec <- file.path(tempdir(), c("repos_1", "repos_2"))
## NOTE
## Suppose that these are two different package repositories following the 
## CRAN directory conventions for contributed packages (e.g. `bin` and `src` 
## subdirectories etc.). For each repository, we'd like to build a `zip` and a 
## `tar.gz` version or package 'devtools.issue'.

## Ensure existence of repository directories //
sapply(repos_vec, dir.create, recursive = TRUE, showWarnings = FALSE)

Build into first repository

devtools::build(binary = TRUE, path = repos_vec[1]) 
## Status: ok
devtools::build(path = repos_vec[1])
## Status: ok

Build into second repository

devtools::build(binary = TRUE, path = repos_vec[2])
## Status: error

This is the actual error I'm getting and I think it has to do with the fact that the directory devtools.issue that has been created when building the first binary is either not removed (should it be?) and/or "messed" up by the build process of the first tar.gz:

> devtools::build(binary = TRUE, path = repos_vec[2])
"Q:/home/apps/RAPPTO~1/apps/r/R-31~1.1/bin/x64/R" --vanilla CMD INSTALL  \
  "C:\Users\jat\Documents\devtools.issue" --build 

* installing to library 'C:/Users/jat/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpglqaO8'
* installing *source* package 'devtools.issue' ...
Warning in file.copy(f, instdir, TRUE) :
  problem copying .\NAMESPACE to C:\Users\jat\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpglqaO8\devtools.issue\NAMESPACE: No such file or directory
Warning in file(file, ifelse(append, "a", "w")) :
  cannot open file 'C:/Users/jat/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpglqaO8/devtools.issue/DESCRIPTION': No such file or directory
Error in file(file, ifelse(append, "a", "w")) : 
  cannot open the connection
ERROR: installing package DESCRIPTION failed for package 'devtools.issue'
* restoring previous 'C:/Users/jat/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpglqaO8/devtools.issue'

I'm guessing that creating the devtools.issue directory when building binaries is a must. But shouldn't it be removed afterwards? After all, I did say "build to path", so I wouldn't necessarily expect anything to be created outside of directory that I specified via path.