Global option to avoid any dependencies (?) #147
Description
A known problem on Windows, is that if a package with a shared library is loaded, the library DLL is locked, and it cannot be overwritten. R CMD INSTALL still succeeds (with an extra message), and all other package files are installed, but the DLL is not, that belongs to the old version of the package.
This is even a problem in a clean session, if some (optional) recursive dependency or remotes is being installed/updated, one might end up with a broken installation.
If we could have a global option or env var to suppress loading optional dependencies, then we could handle all of these failures. (Updating remotes itself is fine, because it has no compiled code.)