[Rd] package development

[Kevin R. Coombes]

Hi,

Terry Therneau's question about package development reminded me of a 
different issue. I maintain several packages along with a repository for 
them at "http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/OOMPA/". Several people 
are working on adding features or testing the packages. So, I often want 
to have both the latest official release and the currently testable 
build of the package available in the repository. I tried putting both 
versions in the same repository, but this leads to a problem for some of 
the testers, who are not familiar with the intricacies of building 
packages. (Thus, I cannot just tell them to get the source tarball and 
compile it; they will have no clue as to what I am talking about. And 
their Windows machines will not have the required tools installed in any 
event.)

The underlying problem is that when you run the command
 >  install.packages(repos="http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/OOMPA")
inside the R Windows GUI, the selection box that appears only lists the 
name of the package, _not_ the version number. Thus, the testers cannot 
tell which of two packages with the same name should be installed.

Is there any way around this problem other than to maintain two 
different repositories?

Thanks in advance,
	Kevin