Would You Like an Update With That Update?

Do you ever have one of those days when a simple task takes forever? You know, those days when you find yourself shaving a yak instead of getting work done?

That happened to me today. I was trying to track down a bit of missing data in an analysis I was doing. In the process of doing that, I came across the Data Explorer package for R, which seemed like it could be useful. (Definitely check it out if you are an R user.) However, my version of R was a little out of date, so I decided to do a, ahem, "quick" upgrade so that I could install the package.

Of course, if I'm going to update R I might as well update RStudio, right?

After updating R and RStudio, I soon realized that, for whatever reason, I could no longer knit to PDF. I spent a decent amount of time trying to troubleshoot the problem, including trying to update packages in MikTex, which was the LaTeX engine I was using. After going down a lot of rabbit holes, I did some Googling and realized that I wasn't the only one having this problem.

Long story short, it seemed like switching to tinytex was the preferred solution (which also meant spending time searching for a non-existent "uninstall" file for MikTeX). Eventually, I got everything back in working order (fingers crossed), but that was not before I had spent the better part of a few hours on my "quick" upgrade.

I guess the moral of the story (according to the bumper sticker) is, "If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is."