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

[Ben Bolker]

On 17-10-25 03:47 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 25/10/2017 2:23 PM, Shivaram Venkataraman wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> CRAN won't accept 1.6.3 after 1.7.0 has been published there.  It
> requires version numbers to be increasing.  There's no provision for the
> scheme you're following.
> 
> Even if there were, it's not easy for a user to ask to install any
> version but the latest one.  They'd need to work out the URL and
> download the tarball and build it from source.  install.packages() has
> no provision for handling this automatically.

  If an older version *were* on CRAN (I understand why this isn't
feasible), devtools::install_version() would take care of some of the
fussy bits (although it still requires having the build tools installed).

  You can use the 'ref' argument in devtools::install_github to point
your users to a tag/release number ...

> I'd suggest that you put the patch releases for older versions on Github
> or some other repository, and explain how users can install directly
> from there.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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