Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 4/17/2009 7:48 AM, ronggui wrote:
2009/4/17 Duncan Murdoch <murd...@stats.uwo.ca>:
[...]
It might be helpful, but often new arguments or changed behaviour happen
later, so you'd really need a full change history for the function:
that's what's in the Subversion log, or to some extent, in the NEWS file.
Only a few packages on CRAN use subversion and/or make it accessible to
others. OK, this is improving with R-Forge. The proposed CHANGELOG
should not duplicate subversion info. It would only be a collection of
major milestones for each function, i.e., a new entry is written in
CHANGELOG when changes are done and included in a new version of R or of
a package, but individual steps followed to get there from one version
to the other would NOT be recorded (use a subversion for that).
But since we've made an explicit decision not to provide active support
for older versions, it seems rather pointless to devote extra resources
to this. Some new function is only available as of 2.8.0? Why would
you care? You should be using 2.8.1 or 2.9.0 by now. If you're using
2.7.1 you're on your own.
Duncan Murdoch
It is not uncommon to use R to analyze some particular data, to save the
script of the analysis, and to write a paper (or a book) about the
results with some electronic supplements (including that script). From
that moment on, the analysis is frozen. However, we may expect that
other people would be interested to rerun the analysis at a later time,
or even, to reuse the script on other data.
Thus, the decision for not providing active support for older versions
should go together with the development of tools that would help people
to upgrade such an old script when needed. I think the proposed tools
fit this goal.
Philippe Grosjean
[...]
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