On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:00 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen <kasperdanielhan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Our experience in Bioconductor is that this is a pretty hard problem. > > What the OP presumably wants is some guarantee that all packages on CRAN work > well together.
Obviously we can not guarantee that all packages on CRAN work together. But what we can do is prevent problems that are introduced by version ambiguity. If author develops and tests a script/package with dependency Rcpp 0.10.6, the best chance of making that script or package work for other users is using Rcpp 0.10.6. This especially holds if there is a big time difference between the author creating the pkg/script and someone using it. In practice most Sweave/knitr scripts used for generating papers and articles can not be reproduced after a while because the dependency packages have changed in the mean time. These problem can largely be mitigated with a release cycle. I am not arguing that anyone should put manual effort into testing that packages work together. On the contrary: a system that separates development from released branches prevents you from having to continuously test all reverse dependencies for every package update. My argument is simply that many problems introduced by version ambiguity can be prevented if we can unite the entire R community around using a single version of each CRAN package for every specific release of R. Similar to how linux distributions use a single version of each software package in a particular release of the distribution. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
