[GH-50603]: [R] remove assertthat dependency + improve error messages

[olivroy]

Rationale for this change

To get rid of assertthat dependency, and use more rlang in error handling. fix #50603

What changes are included in this PR?

• removing assertthat dependency (replaced by rlang's type checkers)
• adding rlang type checkers standalone files.

Are these changes tested?

By existing tests.

Are there any user-facing changes?

No, only error messages standardized.

I have not been able to install the dev version locally, so I would need the workflows to be run, so that I could adjust the tests.

[github-actions]

Thanks for opening a pull request!

If this is not a minor PR. Could you open an issue for this pull request on GitHub? https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/new/choose

Opening GitHub issues ahead of time contributes to the Openness of the Apache Arrow project.

Then could you also rename the pull request title in the following format?

GH-${GITHUB_ISSUE_ID}: [${COMPONENT}] ${SUMMARY}

or

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See also:

• Other pull requests
• Contribution Guidelines - Contributing Overview

[thisisnic]

Thanks for the PR @olivroy! Can you expand more about trying to get the dev version working locally - what have you tried and what errors are you getting? It'll be easier if we help you with that first, as building iteratively on CI burns through a lot of machine time and is a really frustrating process as you wait for the builds to complete which takes much longer than just running devtools::test() once your setup is working.

[thisisnic]

*** Unable to retrieve libarrow for version 25.0.0.9000 (windows-x86_64)

Thanks, that's helpful! It looks like there's an issue with our nightly C++ builds, so actually while we're fixing that then we can probably only easily build on CI so that's fine for now. This is super useful to know though, will have a look at getting it fixed.

Once it is fixed, I think that setting the ARROW_R_DEV environment variable to TRUE will enabled you to use the nightly builds easily: Sys.setenv(ARROW_R_DEV = "true")

[olivroy]

Oh, this is great! Thanks for investigating and finding a fix! This will be useful in the future.

Hopefully, I got everything corrected this time

[olivroy]

I guess this would be ready for review. I am now able to build arrow locally!

• I finalized removing the assertthat dependency and refactored assert_is() to use rlang instead.

Edit: lints corrected now!

[kou]

Could you open a new issue for this?
See the #50525 (comment) comment for details.