[Bioc-devel] version increments for unchanged packages

[Hervé Pagès]

On 06/11/2015 11:50 AM, Hervé Pagès wrote:
> 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.

I forgot that we don't build binaries for data experiment packages
anymore. Because these packages don't need compilation, the source
package can be installed on any platform without the need of any extra
tool (e.g. Rtools or Xcode).

That argument still applies for software packages though...

H.

>
> 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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