[Rd] declaring package dependencies

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 13 September 2013 at 09:51, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| Changes are generally announced in the NEWS.Rd file long before release, 
| but R-devel is an unreleased version, so you won't see the news until it 
| is there.  Announcing things that nobody can try leads to fewer useful 
| comments than putting them into R-devel where at least people can see 
| what is really happening.

That comment makes sense _in theory_.

Yet _in practice_ it does not as many of us have been shot down by tests in
R-devel which had been implemented within a 48 hour window of the package
submission. 

Absent a time machine or psychic powers, I do not see how package developers
can reasonably be expected to cope with this.

I am not close to Python, but the little I know about their PEP system makes
me think that a process in which changes are first announced as concepts,
then discussed and refined and only thereafter implemented seems somewhat
appealing. 

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com