[Bioc-devel] version increments for unchanged packages

[Hervé Pagès]

Hi Stephanie,

On 06/11/2015 11:33 AM, Gabe Becker wrote:
> Stephanie,
>
> As far as I know, it is so that package versions are unique to specific
> releases of bioconductor. This has the benefits of
>
>     1. providing assurances that that particular version of a package is
>     tested and confirmed to work within that release, and
>     2. enforces that the source code/data for a particular version of a
>     package appears only and exactly once within the Bioconductor SVN
>     structure.
>
>
> Together, these prevent there being ambiguity when a package needs to be
> updated/fixed in the context of a particular release, both in terms of what
> version needs to be fixed and where that fix needs to be applied.

Exactly.

One more thing: because the exact version of R that is used to build
binary packages is not necessarily the same between 2 versions of
Bioconductor, we would end up with binary packages that are different
(and possibly not interchangeable) but impossible to distinguish based
on their name if we were not bumping versions (e.g. both would be 
GWASdata_1.4.0.zip). Could make troubleshooting nightmarish.

Hope that makes sense,
H.

>
> Best,
> ~G
>
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:40 AM, Stephanie M. Gogarten <
> sdmorris at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> Why is it that packages with no changes still get new version numbers at
>> every release? For example, my experiment data package GWASdata has not
>> changed since the last release, but the version was bumped from 1.4.0 to
>> 1.6.0. I imagine most users expect that a change in version number
>> indicates some change in content.
>>
>> Stephanie
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bioc-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
>>
>
>
>

-- 
Hervé Pagès

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