[R-package] [ci] MacOS Travis builds timing out

[jameslamb]

See the conversation starting at #3086 (comment). Currently, MacOS r-package builds on Travis are failing with an error like this:

• checking whether package ‘lightgbm’ can be installed ...

No output has been received in the last 10m0s, this potentially indicates a stalled build or something wrong with the build itself.

In this case, "no output" means "nothing written to the log".

It seems that our build times for the R package on Mac were already very close to 10 minutes but just under this. It's possible the issue is caused by one or some combination of these:

• maybe installation of the R package got slightly slower
• maybe something about the Travis Mac environment is slowing us down (for example, slower disk I/O)
• maybe changing print() (which prints to stdout) to message() (which prints to stderr) in [R-package] speed up installation with Visual Studio #2965 is extending the time between logs to stdout

Some possible fixes for this, found by @StrikerRUS

• https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/common-build-problems/#build-times-out-because-no-output-was-received
• should output the log as the command goes when using travis_wait travis-ci/travis-ci#4190 (comment)

[jameslamb]

I did also try using processx::run() on Mac builds...that didn't have a meaningful impact on build times (the way it did for Windows in #2965 )

[StrikerRUS]

Interestingly, Azure build hasn't been affected: same ~7min.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity since it was closed. To start a new related discussion, open a new issue at https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/issues including a reference to this.