[R-pkg-devel] Depending on R 4.5.0 because a related package depends on it?

[Uwe Ligges]

Ivan explained this already, but as you asked again, I will repeat 
Ivan's message:
you do not need to specify version requirements if your package can live 
with older versions of the package you depend on. Then users on old 
versions of R can use your package with an older version of OpenMX.

And even if you depend on a newer version of OpenMx, then that is fine 
as install.packages() finds out on older versions of R that neither the 
required version OpenMx is not installable nor your package.

Best,
Uwe Ligges


On 29.06.2025 10:49, Shu Fai Cheung wrote:
> Thanks a lot! Yes, the specific package I encountered that problem is
> semptools. I didn't specify that (I should have, sorry for that)
> because I am also curious about what we should do in this kind of case
> in general.
> 
> Even if the package could somehow pass the CRAN checks without
> changing the version of R it depends on, is it recommended to change
> the version that semptools depends on to R 4.5.0 because OpenMx has
> this requirement? If yes, I would do
> so to meet CRAN requirements.
> 
> Regards,
> Shu Fai
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2025 at 4:35 PM Ivan Krylov <ikrylov using disroot.org> wrote:
>>
>> В Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:56:36 +0800
>> Shu Fai Cheung <shufai.cheung using gmail.com> пишет:
>>
>>> An R-CMD-check action on an old release of R, conducted by GitHub
>>> action, failed, because Package C depends on R 4.5.0. However, I found
>>> that several other packages that import Package C, including Package
>>> B, do not require R 4.5.0. They also did not fail in all the CRAN
>>> package checks, including those r-oldrel-* checks.
>>
>> Is it semptools -> semPlot -> OpenMx?
>>
>> The situation is indeed suboptimal, because while it's easy to install
>> a binary build of the previous version of OpenMx for r-oldrel from
>> CRAN, installing a compatible version of OpenMx from source requires
>> visiting <https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/OpenMx/> and
>> resolving dependencies manually, one by one. (There's no dependency
>> index of archived packages.)
>>
>> The latest version of semPlot does seem to work with the old version of
>> OpenMx, seeing as it passes the r-oldrel checks. I think that the
>> r-oldrel builders and checkers on CRAN won't notice any problem with
>> semptools either, because they still have the old version of OpenMx
>> installed.
>>
>> --
>> Best regards,
>> Ivan
> 
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