On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Joshua Ulrich <josh.m.ulr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > So implementation isn't a problem. The problem is that you need a way > to force people not to be able to use different package versions than > what existed at the time of each R release. I said this in my > previous email, but you removed and did not address it: "However, you > would need to find a way to actively _prevent_ people from installing > newer versions of packages with the stable R releases." Frankly, I > would stop using CRAN if this policy were adopted.
I am not proposing to "force" anything to anyone, those are your words. Please read the proposal more carefully before derailing the discussion. Below *verbatim* a section from the paper: To fully make the transition to a staged CRAN, the default behavior of the package manager must be modified to download packages from the stable branch of the current version of R, rather than the latest development release. As such, all users on a given version of R will be using the same version of each CRAN package, regardless on when it was installed. The user could still be given an option to try and install the development version from the unstable branch, for example by adding an additional parameter to install.packages named devel=TRUE. However when installing an unstable package, it must be flagged, and the user must be warned that this version is not properly tested and might not be working as expected. Furthermore, when loading this package a warning could be shown with the version number so that it is also obvious from the output that results were produced using a non-standard version of the contributed package. Finally, users that would always like to use the very latest versions of all packages, e.g. developers, could install the r-devel release of R. This version contains the latest commits by R Core and downloads packages from the devel branch on CRAN, but should not be used or in production or reproducible research settings. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
