[R-pkg-devel] Semantic versioning and maintenance releases

[Shivaram Venkataraman]

Hello

We have an R package that uses semantic versioning -- i.e. version numbers
are of the form major_version.minor_version.patch_version

One of the ways we use the patch_versions is to make maintenance releases
or security fixes that users can apply without worrying about any
functionality changes. For example if our users were on 1.6.2 it is often
easier for them to upgrade to 1.6.3 which has a security fix rather than
1.7.0

On the other hand our development continues towards the next minor version
and we sometimes have cases where say 1.6.3 is released after 1.7.0.

While running `R CMD check --as-cran` for version 1.6.3 we find that this
leads to a warning which looks like 'Insufficient package version (submitted:
1.6.3, existing: 1.7.0)'.

Our question is whether it is okay to upload these maintenance releases to
CRAN and if there is some way we can mark that the version numbers follow
semantic versioning.

Thanks
Shivaram

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