[Rd] Different package versions on CRAN?

[Uwe Ligges]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Sun, 8 May 2005, Philippe Grosjean wrote:
> 
>> I am making changes to some of my packages that are exposed in CRAN. 
>> Some changes make them incompatible with previous R versions [and I 
>> use Depends: R (>= 2.1.0)]. I suspect that, as soon as I will upload 
>> this new version to CRAN, it will replace the old one _everywhere_?
> 
> 
> No.  It would not be offered as an update to systems running R < 2.1.0.
> 
>> However, the previous version of these packages remains perfectly 
>> usable with R 1.9.X or 2.0.X. So, will this break the binaries in 
>> /windows/contrib/1.9|2.0, or will the latest valid binaries of my 
>> packages remain there, not updated? To put it another way, for
> 
> 
> We do not update binary versions for obselete versions of R.  Just look 
> at the dates on the directories: 2.0 was last updated on April 19.  And 
> even if we did (the 1.9 directory was AFAIR updated for a bit after 
> 2.0.0 came out) the version depending on R >= 2.1.0 would not build and 

Yes, you are perfectly right.
There is also documentation that is even more specific in 
CRAN/bin/windows/contrib/1.9/ReadMe which tells us:

***********************************************************
This collection is for rw1090/1 only. It is no longer being
updated: please update to rw2001. Last update: 15.12.2004.
***********************************************************


I planned to update R-2.0.x also for a while. In fact, too many packages 
had versions out that depended on R>=2.1.0 very quickly (even if not 
mentioned in the DESCRIPTION file), and it's a whole mess to let the 
autobuilder decide which package to update, which not, and which to mark 
to be erroneous. So I decided not to update anything in order not to 
disarrange the whole repository.



> so the last good version would be left.

Yes, and accordingly CRAN/bin/windows/contrib/ReadMe tells us:

   ./1.9   Binaries for R-1.9.x - no longer updated
   ./2.0   Binaries for R-2.0.x - no longer updated
   ./2.1   Binaries for R-2.1.x - release (AKA r-release)


Uwe