[Rd] CRAN package with dependencies on Bioconductor

[Kornelius Rohmeyer]

2011/6/11 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>:
[...]
> I don't understand.  It sounds as though you're saying these two
> contradictory things:
>
>  - your package works with any version of graph
>  - CRAN builds a version of graph that is incompatible with your package.

No, the first statement is correct but not the second:

- Installed from source my package works with any version of graph and also:
  - A binary of my package built with graph 1.28 will work with graph 1.28.
  - A binary of my package built with graph 1.30 will work with graph 1.30.

- But a binary of my package built with graph 1.30 will not work with
graph 1.28.
  (If it is surprising for anyone, that this can happen, we can go
into detail here.
   I doubt that this is the place to fix things, but maybe I am wrong?)

I personally found it unfortunate, that due to different policies of
CRAN and Bioconductor for R 2.12 there are (up to my knowledge) no
more any binary packages of gMCP and graph available for R 2.12 that
are compatible. (In this case the problem can be solved manually by
installing the graph package binary from Bioconductor for R 2.13 that
works also for R 2.12.)

> I am not involved with setting CRAN policy, but their current policy (build
> the most recent version of a package that declares itself compatible with
> the relevant version of R) seems reasonable.

Personally I find it more reasonable to apply the Bioconductor policy
to Bioconductor packages that are installed on CRAN for building
packages that depend on those. But you and Uwe seem to disagree. Since
this is (IMHO) a matter of taste and where one assigns priorities and
these seem to differ, there is not much to discuss…

Thanks for the clear advise and also thanks to all CRAN maintainers
for the great services nevertheless!

Best regards, Kornelius.