On 20/06/2012 11:20, peter dalgaard wrote:
On Jun 19, 2012, at 23:29 , Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On 19/06/2012 17:35, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Jun 19, 2012, at 5:36 AM, peter dalgaard wrote:
On Jun 19, 2012, at 01:16 , Colstat wrote:
I think the error says it "package Œgdata‚ was built under R
version 2.15.1" and you have R 2.5.10.
Update your R first, let me know if it doesn't work.
2.15.1 is announced for Friday... I think it's a bit of a
glitch that CRAN is already automatically providing packages
for it, but you are of course more than welcome to test the
prereleases (from http://R.research.att.com/).
I suppose that this comes about from building packages with
R-patched, which transitions directly into the prereleases for
the next version.
Yes, this is a side-effect of that. I wonder what we can do about
it - I used to build packages with released versions only, but
then people complained that patched had fixes for some things
they needed...
We could simply not update the version of R-patched used during the
beta/RC periods: they are after all only about 10 days.
Yes, that would handle the formal issue of the version number
conflict.
However, there's a deeper issue which got highlighted by the
identical() debacle in April-June: It seems that we can't guarantee
ABI compatibility throughout the R-branch series (e.g., everything
labeled 2.15.x). We try to ensure that the modified versions of R
will run packages built with a previous version, but the other way
around might not work. If that sort of thing happens in R-patched,
midway between releases, then users could find themselves blocked
from installing packages until they update to R-patched, which could
be undesirable in corporate or educational settings.
Note this only applies to binary packages: people can always install
from the sources (trivially for 'gdata' since it has no compiled code).
My understanding is that the Windows' policy is to stick with the
current 2.15.x release: 2.15.0 is currently used but once 2.15.1 is out
packages will be built with 2.15.1 (and re-built if their dependencies
change).
The 'debacle' was Bioconductor's lack of understanding of the
assumptions of their own distribution model. As we said at the time, if
you want to provide binary packages that work under all of 2.15.x, you
need to prepare them with 2.15.0. But as Simon points out, that may
stop binary packages being provided for some recent source packages.
Note that there are other issues here: as we have seen in the last week,
updates and downdates to a recommended package such as Matrix have
required other packages to be re-installed. It is not just the version
of R that is relevant but also what other packages were installed at the
time the binary package was prepared.
We may need to work harder to get people to understand that binary
packages have 'use at your own risk' status.
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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