[R-sig-Debian] R-3.4.0 and recommended packages

[Johannes Ranke]

Am Donnerstag, 27. April 2017, 06:32:13 schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel:
> On 27 April 2017 at 12:01, Johannes Ranke wrote:
> | > so it seems to me this must affect all packages in Debian sid that were
> | > built before the release of R 3.4.0!
> | 
> | or rather before 14 April 2017, which is when R from revision r72510 was
> | uploaded to sid as pre-release candidate.
> 
> Another example with KernSmooth:
>    > library(KernSmooth)
> 
>    KernSmooth 2.23 loaded
>    Copyright M. P. Wand 1997-2009
> 
>    > example(bkde)
> 
>    bkde> data(geyser, package="MASS")
> 
>    bkde> x <- geyser$duration
> 
>    bkde> est <- bkde(x, bandwidth=0.25)
>    Error in linbin(x, gpoints, truncate) : object 'F_linbin' not found
> 
> 
> Maybe this part of NEWS is what matters:
> 
>     * Packages which register native routines for .C or .Fortran need
>       to be re-installed for this version (unless installed with
>       R-devel SVN revision r72375 or later).

Yes, that is what Martin Mächler referred to in the answer to Björan's call 
for help on r-help.

> KernSmooth surely has .Fortran. Your spatial example had VR_frset failing,
> and that too is called by the old .C.
> 
> A counter-example is eg my RcppEigen package -- I can load it and run
> example(fastLm) just fine as that uses .Call rather than .C or .Fortran.
> 
> I think you are
> 
>  -- correct in that we need rebuilds
>  -- but only for packages using .C and .Fortran calls to compiled

Yes.

> This may be a use case for r-api-4. Or not as it doesn't break _all_
> packages so I am not sure we should force _all_ packages to be rebuilt.
> 
> Can we not find the ones that use .C and .Fortran ?

I do not understand how the use of r-api-x works, but my feeling is that it 
will not allow to differentiate between packages using .C and .Fortan and the 
rest.

I am surprised that I did not see a related bug report in the Debian BTS yet, 
did I overlook something? I only looked for r-base.