[R-pkg-devel] (Not) Reporting minimum R version in DESCRIPTION Depends Field

[Hadley Wickham]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 8:46 AM Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
>
>    I'd add: as far as I know CRAN policy would only require you to
> report the minimum version if your package would fail on one of the
> older R versions that CRAN still tests (at present I think this goes
> back to 3.5.2).  For regular package developers (i.e.  without the
> resources of RStudio) it's a nuisance to install lots of old versions of
> R just to find out how far back your package actually works.

If you already use travis, this is pretty easy. All you need is something like:

matrix:
  include:
  - r: release
  - r: devel
  - r: oldrel
  - r: 3.4
  - r: 3.3
  - r: 3.2
  - r: 3.1

Obviously the challenge is making things work on older versions of R —
in our experience this is either really easy (i.e. you just
accidentally used a function that was added to R recently) or really
rather hard (your code on works in recent R because of bug that R core
fixed)

Hadley

> IMO it's a
> little bit obnoxious (albeit maybe unintentionally so) to prevent users
> who are stuck with earlier versions from using your package without a
> good reason.
>   (For this reason I try to save RData files that are included in my
> packages with version=2 so that users with R <3.5.0 aren't left out ...)
>
>   Unless you know that your package depends on features introduced in a
> particular version of R, I'd leave it out.  If you find out later from
> users that it breaks on earlier versions, and you can't find a way to
> enable its use on earlier versions, you can add the dependency in a
> later release.
>
>  Ben Bolker
>
> On 2019-07-26 10:20 a.m., Hadley Wickham wrote:
> > I no longer believe this to be good advice - I think you should only
> > declare a specific dependency if you want to strongly assert that your
> > package works with those versions. For example, all tidyverse versions
> > depend on R 3.2 and later, because we test on all those versions.
> >
> > Hadley
> >
> > On Friday, July 26, 2019, Jarrett Phillips <phillipsjarrett1 using gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> Numerous CRAN packages report minimum R versions within the Depends field
> >> of the DESCRIPTION file.
> >>
> >> Is this reporting always necessary?
> >>
> >> Hadley Wickham's book "R Packages" states:
> >>
> >> "You can also use Depends to require a specific version of R, e.g.
> >> Depends: R
> >> (>= 3.0.1) . As with packages, it’s a good idea to play it safe and require
> >> a version greater than or equal to the version you’re currently using.
> >> devtools::create()  will do this for you."
> >>
> >> devtools::check() doesn't warn about not specifying R version, so I am just
> >> curious.
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Jarrett
> >>
> >>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >>
> >> ______________________________________________
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> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
> >>
> >
> >
>
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