[R-pkg-devel] Note to repository maintainers about ABI change in Matrix 1.6-2

[Mikael Jagan]

For repositories != CRAN:

Matrix 1.6-2 was released on Nov 8.  Due to an ABI change, repositories
maintaining R package binaries should ensure that binaries for the first
order reverse LinkingTo of Matrix are rebuilt under Matrix 1.6-2:


 > db <- available.packages(repos = "https://cran.r-project.org/")
 > tools::package_dependencies("Matrix", db = db, which = "LinkingTo", reverse = 
TRUE)[[1L]]
  [1] "ahMLE"               "bayesWatch"          "cplm"
  [4] "GeneralizedWendland" "geostatsp"           "hibayes"
  [7] "irlba"               "lme4"                "mcmcsae"
[10] "OpenMx"              "PRIMME"              "robustlmm"
[13] "spGARCH"             "TMB"


Typically, ABI changes occur only rarely, when Matrix updates the internal
SuiteSparse libraries and _those_ libraries change _their_ ABI.  This case
is an exception: we discovered that certain function prototypes in our
headers were inconsistent with corresponding prototypes in the SuiteSparse
headers, and the "consistent" prototypes were not binary compatible.

It is for this reason (and others) that Matrix has begun versioning its ABI,
as I announced in an earlier thread on R-SIG-Mac:

     https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2023-October/014890.html

That (in addition to future, more proactive announcements on mailing lists)
should allow repository maintainers to adapt sooner going forward.

Mikael