[R-pkg-devel] Suggesting an archived package in the DESCRIPTION file

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 March 2024 at 11:56, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about r-universe.  On the one hand, it is really 
| nicely put together, and it offers the service described above.  On the 
| other, it's probably a bad idea to follow its advice and use 
| install.packages() with `repos` as shown:  that will install development 
| versions of packages, not releases.

Yup. It's a point I raised right at the start as I really do believe in
curated releases but clearly a lot of people prefer the simplicity of
'tagging a release' at GitHub and then getting a build.

r-universe is indeed good at what it does and reliable. There are limited
choices in 'driving' what you can do with it.  We rely quite heavily on it in
a large project for work.  As each 'repo' can appear only once in a universe,
we resorted to having the 'offical' build follow GitHub 'releases', as well
as (optional, additional) builds against a the main branch from another
universe.  This example is for a non-CRAN package.

With CRAN packages, r-universe can be useful too. For some of my packages, I
now show multiple 'badges' at the README: for the released CRAN version as
well as for the current 'rc' in the main branch sporting a differentiating
final digit.  RcppArmadillo had a pre-releases available to test that way for
a few weeks til the new release this week.  So in effect, this gives you what
`drat` allows yet also automagically adds builds. It's quite useful when you
are careful about it.
 
| Do you know if it's possible for a package to suggest the CRAN version 
| first, with an option like the above only offered as a pre-release option?

In the language of Debian and its dpkg and tools, one solution to that would
be 'repository pinning' to declare a 'value' on a repository.  There, the
default is 500, and e.g. for r2u I set this to 700 as you usually want its
versions.

We do not have this for R, but it could be added (eventually) as a new value
in PACKAGES, or as a new supplementary attribute.

Dirk

-- 
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