[Bioc-devel] The importance of bumping (incrementing) package version numbers

[Dan Tenenbaum]

Hello, bioc-devel community,

This is a reminder that when you make changes to your Bioconductor packages in our Subversion repository, those changes do not propagate to our website/repository, or to users, unless you bump (increment) the version number.

So for example, if you discover a bug in R/code.R and you fix it and commit that file, end users will still experience the bug because you didn't also bump the version number. 

To bump the version number, edit the DESCRIPTION file and change the Version field so that the last segment is one higher than it was. For example, if the version was 1.5.7 before your changes, bump it to 1.5.8. Then commit the DESCRIPTION file.

You should not generally change the first or second segments of the version number. For more information about version numbers, see http://www.bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/version-numbering/ .

This reminder was prompted by noticing that changes have been committed to a number of packages without updates to the DESCRIPTION file. It's possible this is intentional (the reason for doing this is to see if your package still builds and checks on all platforms after making some change, before bumping the version). But in most cases you should get in the habit of bumping the version number every time you commit a change. 

Thanks. Please email the bioc-devel list if you have questions about this.
Dan