Windows installation error (missing dependency)

[florisvdh]

My colleague works in Windows. He tried to install a package which, at some level, had gdalUtils as a dependency. Installation halted because of the non-installed dependency R.methodsS3 of gdalUtils (it is a dependency of R.utils, on which gdalUtils depends). The problem could be reproduced by re-trying to install gdalUtils on its own:

> install.packages("gdalUtils")
Installing package into ‘C:/R/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)

  There is a binary version available but the source version is later:
          binary  source needs_compilation
gdalUtils  2.0.3 2.0.3.2             FALSE

installing the source package ‘gdalUtils’

trying URL 'https://cloud.r-project.org/src/contrib/gdalUtils_2.0.3.2.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 1062906 bytes (1.0 MB)
downloaded 1.0 MB

* installing *source* package 'gdalUtils' ...
** package 'gdalUtils' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** R
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
Error in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :
  there is no package called 'R.methodsS3'
Calls: <Anonymous> ... loadNamespace -> withRestarts -> withOneRestart -> doWithOneRestart
Execution halted
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package 'gdalUtils'
* removing 'C:/R/library/gdalUtils'

The downloaded source packages are in
        ‘C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpcLeGBA\downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("gdalUtils") :
  installation of package ‘gdalUtils’ had non-zero exit status

While this is remedied by manually installing R.methodsS3 first, I wonder whether there is some 'better' way to prevent this error from happening? If I understand well, the idea of R package installation is that missing dependencies are automatically installed.