On 17-10-25 03:47 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > On 25/10/2017 2:23 PM, Shivaram Venkataraman wrote: >> Hello >> >> We have an R package that uses semantic versioning -- i.e. version >> numbers >> are of the form major_version.minor_version.patch_version >> >> One of the ways we use the patch_versions is to make maintenance releases >> or security fixes that users can apply without worrying about any >> functionality changes. For example if our users were on 1.6.2 it is often >> easier for them to upgrade to 1.6.3 which has a security fix rather than >> 1.7.0 >> >> On the other hand our development continues towards the next minor >> version >> and we sometimes have cases where say 1.6.3 is released after 1.7.0. >> >> While running `R CMD check --as-cran` for version 1.6.3 we find that this >> leads to a warning which looks like 'Insufficient package version >> (submitted: >> 1.6.3, existing: 1.7.0)'. >> >> Our question is whether it is okay to upload these maintenance >> releases to >> CRAN and if there is some way we can mark that the version numbers follow >> semantic versioning. > > CRAN won't accept 1.6.3 after 1.7.0 has been published there. It > requires version numbers to be increasing. There's no provision for the > scheme you're following. > > Even if there were, it's not easy for a user to ask to install any > version but the latest one. They'd need to work out the URL and > download the tarball and build it from source. install.packages() has > no provision for handling this automatically.
If an older version *were* on CRAN (I understand why this isn't feasible), devtools::install_version() would take care of some of the fussy bits (although it still requires having the build tools installed). You can use the 'ref' argument in devtools::install_github to point your users to a tag/release number ... > I'd suggest that you put the patch releases for older versions on Github > or some other repository, and explain how users can install directly > from there. > > Duncan Murdoch > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
