We had a similar issue with Windows 7. Oddly enough, the installation of RStan was not problematic on some laptops yet failed on others despite very similar environments (Windows 7, R 3.5.1, RStudio 1.1.453, Rtools 3.4.0.1962) with a similar message as the original post in this thread (‘C:/Program’ not found).
R was installed to the default directory c:/Program files/R. The laptops on which everything worked fine showed 8dot3 shortnames (so for instance C:\PROGRA~1\R) when the command dir /x was executed in a DOS prompt at c:/. In other cases this was missing.
The following workaround was successful:
- open a DOS terminal
- Type:
mklink /J "C:\PROGRA~1" "C:\Program Files"and press enter (this will create a directory junction from C:\PROGRA~1 to C:\Program Files, which will be visible in the windows explorer) (see also this link) - Open RStudio
- Go to Tools - Global Options and click Change R-version in the General tab.
- Click “Choose a specific version of R” and click on browse.
- Copy paste C:\PROGRA~1\R in the destination folder. Click further to the map containing your most recent R version (R-x.y.z).
- In the screen that pops up choose 64-bits R version (or 32-bits)
- Click Apply and restart Rstudio
After that, RStan and brms worked fine (after install.packages(“rstan”)).
I hope someone points this to the root cause of the problem… maybe @bgoodri? I guess it has nothing to do with rstan, but rather the interaction between Rstudio and Rtools?