[R] Recommended way of requiring packages of a certain version?

[Allan Engelhardt]

What is the recommended way of requiring a certain version when loading 
a package (or, indeed, from R itself)?

Perl has the

require module version
use module version
require version
use version

constructs which is kind of what I am looking for (especially 'use' 
which is evaluated at compile time), but R seems to have lost the 
version= argument to require().

The best I have been able to come up with are constructs of the form

if ( utils::compareVersion(utils::packageDescription("data.table", 
fields="Version"), "1.5") < 0 ) stop("Need data.table version 1.5 or later")
if ( utils::compareVersion(as.character(getRversion()), "2.11") >= 0 ) 
stop("Does not work yet with latest R.")

But this is tedious and error prone.  I have created my own require() 
function to automate this (it takes a vector of versions and a vector of 
comparisons and only load the package if they are all met), but it is 
non-standard and just that much harder for my colleagues to maintain. 
Somebody must already have done this?

Allan

PS: Shouldn't utils::compareVersion("2.11.0", "2.11") return zero 
instead of one?