[R-sig-Fedora] R 4.0.0

[José Abílio Matos]

On Friday, 15 May 2020 11.33.26 WEST Iñaki Ucar wrote:
> The rationale behind the user settings is that the user dir is not
> controlled by the system, so versioning it is the only way to avoid
> breakage. For the system library, there are better tools to prevent
> that.

Do you know the difference between theory and practice? :-)

In theory they are equal but in practice... :-)

> > > I mean, +1 to less boilerplate for packages, but changing the release
> > > + the ABI specification is not a big deal and solves those issues. For
> > > me, having a path with full version specification only makes sense if
> > > there is more than one version installed at the same time, like
> > > Python.
> > 
> > That would also be a nice side effect. 
> 
> Are you suggesting that we should maintain several versions of R at
> the same time? I don't think we want or should go down that path... 

No I am not suggesting that. :-)

If we take the example from python where I have installed versions from python 
3.4 to 3.9 (that is yet in alpha stage).

# rpm -qf /usr/bin/python3.?
python34-3.4.10-10.fc32.x86_64
python35-3.5.9-1.fc32.x86_64
python36-3.6.10-2.fc32.x86_64
python37-3.7.7-1.fc32.x86_64
python3-3.8.2-2.fc32.x86_64
python39-3.9.0~a6-1.fc32.x86_64

The only version where I have python packages installed is for 3.8 (since I am 
using Fedora 32 - as it can be seen above).

That allows me to test the base version for python without having to compile 
every time and every where I want to use it.

And although it was not my initial motivation but you probably saw the 
discussion today on R-devel (Rd) about people not testing the versions alpha, 
beta and rc from r-devel.
A versioned system path would allow to test this more easily.

-- 
José Abílio