Cryptic error message for missing Bioc package.

[grst]

I spent almost a day debugging the following error message
caused by the following line in my travis build of an R package:

> Rscript -e 'deps <- remotes::dev_package_deps(dependencies = NA)' 

Error in vapply(remote, function(x) remote_sha(x), character(1), USE.NAMES = FALSE) : 
  values must be type 'character',
 but FUN(X[[1]]) result is type 'logical'
Calls: <Anonymous> -> combine_deps -> remote_deps -> vapply
Execution halted

Minimal Example

create empty package:

Rscript -e "usethis::create_package("test.remotes")

Append the following lines to DESCRIPTION

Depends:
  BiocInstaller
Remotes:
  bioc::BiocInstaller

Run dev_package_deps:

Rscript -e 'deps <- remotes::dev_package_deps(dependencies = NA)'

Expected Behaviour

I figured out that the problem is caused by BiocInstaller having been removed from the latest Bioconductor release. After removing the dependency from my DESCRIPTION file everything works as expected.

It would be nice to have a more meaningful error message for a missing package.