[Bioc-devel] choosing R version dependency for existing packages

[Paul Shannon]

Thanks, Martin.

I have backed off MotifDB’s R requirement to 3.5.0.  I will experiment with removing the requirement entirely in the new devel branch. 

 - Paul

> On Nov 3, 2018, at 1:37 AM, Martin Morgan <mtmorgan.bioc using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If users are 'playing by the books' and using BiocManager::install(), the version of R is coupled with the version of Bioconductor / your package, so specifying an R version is irrelevant. In addition, saying your package has a dependency R >=... implies that there will be no breaking changes in some future R, which requires a certain amount of foresight. And using R itself would seem to be a requirement for an R package. So in principle my feeling is that it doesn't make sense to include R or an R version as a dependency.
> 
> In a more practical setting it might be that your package depends on a specific feature of R, or that you yourself are only confident that a particular version of R will provide the needs of your package. It might then be appropriate to specify that R version. Again in the domain of the ideal, new R features would be introduced in R-devel, with bug fixes only in the point releases. So a dependency like R >= 3.5.0 would seem appropriate.
> 
> I'm not sure whether these comments are helpful or not... __
> 
> Martin
> 
> On 11/2/18, 3:19 PM, "Bioc-devel on behalf of Paul Shannon" <bioc-devel-bounces using r-project.org on behalf of paul.thurmond.shannon using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>    A user of MotifDb requests - sensibly, I think - that I loosen the requirement
> 
>      Depends: R (>= 3.5.1)
> 
>    which I added before the release.   This seems sensible and supported by, for example, R (>= 2.10) in GenomicRanges.
> 
>    Is this, then, the heuristic?
> 
>      - new packages should depend on the lastest release of R
> 
>      - older existing packages should depend on earlier
>        versions of R, possibly sticking with the version of R in 
>        which they originally appeared, as long as they have not 
>        been subsequently modified to use new R features.
> 
>    - Paul
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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