[Rd] Upgrading a package to which other packages are LinkingTo

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 16 December 2016 at 08:20, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| Perhaps the solution is to recommend that packages which export their 
| C-level entry points either guarantee them not to change or offer 
| (require?) version checks by user code.  So dplyr should start out by 
| saying "I'm using Rcpp interface 0.12.8".  If Rcpp has a new version 
| with a compatible interface, it replies "that's fine".  If Rcpp has 
| changed its interface, it says "Sorry, I don't support that any more."

We try. But it's hard, and I'd argue, likely impossible.

For example I even added a "frozen" package [1] in the sources / unit tests
to test for just this. In practice you just cannot hit every possible access
point of the (rich, in our case) API so the tests pass too often.

Which is why we relentlessly test against reverse-depends to _at least ensure
buildability_ from our releases.

As for seamless binary upgrade, I don't think in can work in practice.  Ask
Uwe one day we he rebuilds everything every time on Windows. And for what it
is worth, we essentially do the same in Debian.

Sometimes you just need to rebuild.  That may be the price of admission for
using the convenience of rich C++ interfaces.

Dirk

[1] https://github.com/RcppCore/Rcpp/tree/master/inst/unitTests/testRcppPackage


| Duncan Murdoch
| 
| >
| > Thanks.
| >
| >
| > Best regards
| >
| > Kirill
| >
| >
| > [1] https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/2308#issuecomment-267495075
| > [2] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L589-L593
| > [3] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L619-L645
| > [4] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L671-L703
| >
| > ______________________________________________
| > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
| >
| 
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http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org