intermittent failure of non-interactive GEE access

[brownag]

When knitting the README or vignettes I get intermittent failures. It appears to be related to how the python code is being interpreted, it may also be related to the authorization mode "notebook" vs. "gcloud".

On Windows I get intermittent success, but it essentially always fails on my Manjaro machine.

• Test with older versions of reticulate and earthengine-api
• Look at recursive calls (in e.g. maskedimage $download() method) that may result in C STACK USAGE overflow
• Verify that auth_mode="notebook" is being used as expected; is there some way that Application Default Credentials are persisting even after gcloud auth application-default revoke?

[brownag]

It appears this could be related to the version of reticulate and some interaction with RStudio/knitr rendering environment.

The most recent reticulate version that works for interactive calls to rmarkdown::render() appears to be reticulate 1.38.0, with some differences in versions between since 1.35. Integrated rendering with RStudio Knit button rarely seems to work as expected--but very occasionally it works. Sometimes the download command aborts the session, and more recent (1.39, 1.40) versions seem to hang indefinitely, preventing ending the session cleanly. Need to investigate what could cause this. There are never any issues with directly running the same code interactively.