For package authors using Github Action, one reason why they forget to actually check their packages against the minimal R version specified in DESCRIPTION may be the use of _relative_ versions in the workflows like this: https://github.com/r-lib/actions/blob/v2/examples/check-full.yaml i.e., checking against the 5 last minor releases of R (and this example workflow says even 5 is likely to be an overkill and recommends people to test only one old release instead). As a result, as R makes new releases, packages will not be tested against older versions of R anymore and package authors won't notice it.
Speaking of guilt, someone has a package that states `Depends: R (>= 3.6.0)` (by coincidence): https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L117 but it's only checked against R >= 4.0.x (oldrel-4) at the moment: https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/.github/workflows/R-CMD-check.yaml#L41 To ensure the package is checked against the minimal R version and above, we'd have to enumerate all version numbers like this: https://github.com/yihui/litedown/blob/main/.github/workflows/R-CMD-check.yaml#L19-L29 And this list needs to be updated after each new release of R. I'm not sure if Jan was proposing to CRAN or package authors for such checks, but I feel this is primarily the responsibility of package authors. Regards, Yihui On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 1:51 PM Josiah Parry <josiah.pa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I’ve been guilty of this myself. I think a check would be good. > > In my case I was using the new sort_by() function (I think also 4.1) and a > user was failing to install on R 4.0. > > > On Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 11:30 Jan Netík <neti...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > I have a server with R 3.6.3 installed and I struggled a bit with > > updating several R packages that utilizes some new syntax introduced in R > > 4.1.0, such as the native pipe |> or function definition shorthand \(x) ... > > > > The thing is that these packages states "Depends: R (>= 3.6.0)" and pass R > > CMD Check without any issues. My problem occurred at the installation time. > > I can see that developers naturally include the new handy syntax but > > oftentimes forget to raise R version dependency in their DESCRIPTIONs. > > Should we employ some new checks? > > > > Best, > > Jan ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
