[Bioc-devel] different generator for random integers in R-devel

[Stadler, Michael]

Dear maintainers of the BioC build system

I have a shy questions regarding R-devel versions on the build machines:

Currently, these use different versions of R-devel: 
malbec2 | Linux ...   | R Under development (unstable) (2019-01-21 r75999)
tokay2  | Windows ... | R Under development (unstable) (2019-03-09 r76216)
merida2 | OS X ...    | R Under development (unstable) (2018-11-27 r75683)
celaya2 | OS X ...    | R Under development (unstable) (2019-01-22 r76000)

A recent change in R-devel
(mostly in r76160, see https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/e4acfd1f240a42b3fc1474a4d97017114e4eb053)
has changed the behaviour of sample()
(see also https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=17494 and https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2018-September/076817.html).

In order to maintain backward compatibility, we are using RNGkind(..., sample.kind = "Rounding")
to temporarily fall back to the behaviour of R-3.5. However, this will cause an error on R-devel < r76160,
where RNGkind() does not yet understand the "sample.kind" argument (currently malbec2, merida2 and celaya2).

This will obviously resolve itself once R-devel gets updated on the build machines, latest upon release of BioC 3.9.
I am just curious whether R-devel will be updated on the builders before that, so this issue does not mask other
potential problems in our package (QuasR).

Thanks,
Michael