On 11-10-20 10:56 AM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
My package will have an update soon, that is not backward compatible
with the current version. It will likely break much of the existing
code. Many (~50) packages depend on 'igraph' and they, too, will most
probably break with the new version.
My intended solution is, that I create a snapshot of the current
package, under another name (igraph0), and ask package maintainers to
depend on that version. Then, after a short time, I'll update the
current igraph version.
The optimal solution would be if R packages could depend on a specific
version of a package, and a user could have multiple packages
installed, and different versions loaded simultaneously so that
different packages could depend on different versions. This is what
(e.g.) ruby gems do. Unfortunately this is a hard problem to solve -
namespaces go some way to help, but I think there are still
outstanding S3 and S4 issues.
We did have an attempt at that for some versions, but I don't think it
ever achieved all of its goals, and we've dropped it.
I'm not sure it would be "optimal" even if it was completely
implemented. It introduces a lot of complexity. Simplicity is better,
even if it is sometimes more work.
My work around of renaming packages after API breaking changes is
definitely a sub-optimal fix.
Yes. The optimal solution would be for all the packages that use yours
to update to the latest version. More work, but they end up in a better
place. (Or even better, if all package writers got it right the first
time :-).
Duncan Murdoch
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