[R-pkg-devel] Matrix 1.7-0 to be released in March with ABI-breaking SuiteSparse update

[Tim Taylor]

Hi Mikael

Revisiting this. Have the plans changed for 1.7-0 release?

Tim

On Mon, 12 Feb 2024, at 6:36 PM, Mikael Jagan wrote:
> Dear users and binary repository maintainers,
> 
> We are preparing Matrix version 1.7-0 for CRAN submission on March 11, ahead
> of the spring release of R version 4.4.0.  The only significant change from
> Matrix 1.6-5 is an update of the internal SuiteSparse libraries
> (5.10.1 -> 7.6.0).  Unfortunately, the old and new SuiteSparse versions are 
> binary incompatible, hence so too will be the old and new Matrix versions.
> 
> A corollary is that users and binary repository maintainers switching between
> Matrix < 1.7-0 and Matrix >= 1.7-0 must rebuild _from sources_ packages that
> link Matrix:
> 
> > tools::package_dependencies("Matrix", which = "LinkingTo", reverse = TRUE)[[1L]]
>   [1] "ahMLE"               "bayesWatch"          "cplm"
>   [4] "GeneralizedWendland" "geostatsp"           "irlba"
>   [7] "lme4"                "mcmcsae"             "OpenMx"
> [10] "PRIMME"              "PUlasso"             "robustlmm"
> [13] "spGARCH"             "TMB"                 "bcSeq"
> 
> For users, that means doing, e.g.,
> 
>      install.packages("lme4", type = "source")
> 
> but an alternative for Windows and macOS users without the required tools is
> 
>      oo <- options(repos = "https://cran.r-project.org/")
>      install.packages("Matrix")
>      install.packages("lme4")
>      options(oo)
> 
> where we trust CRAN to provide binaries compatible with the latest Matrix
> version (because we notify CRAN upon submission about required rebuilds).
> Once other repositories react with rebuilds, they can be used instead of
> CRAN.
> 
> Our reverse dependency checks (and history, intuition, ...) show that most
> problems (caught segfaults in this case) can be traced to a binary incompatible
> lme4 and not to one of the other packages linking Matrix.  Still, we recommend
> rebuilds for all 15 packages.
> 
> Maintainers of packages that link Matrix can implement an .onLoad test for
> possible binary incompatibility by comparing the value of
> 
>      if (utils::packageVersion("Matrix") >= "1.6.2")
>          Matrix::Matrix.Version()[["abi"]]
>      else numeric_version("0")
> 
> at install time and at load time, warning the user if the values differ.
> But please do look at the above and not at packageVersion("Matrix") directly,
> as the ABI version is incremented less often than the package version.
> 
> Mikael {on behalf of citation("Matrix")$author}
> 
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