[Bioc-devel] Installing New BioConductor Packages

[Marc Carlson]

Hi Jeff,

The basic problem you are having is that your package is part of Bioc
2.7 which releases early this fall.  So until then it will remain in the
development branch of Bioconductor.  At that point, it will
automatically be promoted to the new release because you will have taken
care to maintain it and make sure that it is still functioning.  After
the fall, your package will be in the 2.7 release along with the 2.8
development branch until the spring when the branching process will
repeat again for the 2.8 release.  Things have to be done this way
because the ever shifting needs of scientific computing result in the
Bioconductor software being in a near constant state of flux as the
project evolves.  Therefore we simply cannot guarantee that your package
will work with older releases of R and Bioconductor because a lot of
things have changed.  And ultimately, we just don't have the massive
resources to engage in the comprehensive testing and maintenance
required for retroactive compatibility.

If you want to use the package with Bioconductor now your safest bet is
to simply use the development branch.  It may occur to you that you can
also manually download the package from the website and force install
into an older release, but this is a very bad practice for the reasons
that I have described above.  If you go that route, you may end up with
things behaving in ways that you don't expect since things have not been
tested to work there.

Hope this helps,


  Marc



On 08/03/2010 09:04 AM, lists at jdadesign.net wrote:
> I apologize if this is a rookie question, but I can't seem to get things
> working.
>
> I have a package that was accepted into BioConductor 2.7. The simple
> installation instructions:
>
>   
>> source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
>> biocLite("MBCB")
>>     
> haven't been working for me on either R 2.10 or 2.11. It only seems to
> work on the development version of R (which defaults to BC 2.7 instead of
> 2.5 or 2.6).
>
> What's the easiest way to allow people to install my package without
> having to be in the development version of R?
>
> Thanks, in advance.
> Jeff
>
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