CRAN policies

On 12-03-27 10:59 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:

On 27.03.2012 16:17, Paul Gilbert wrote:

One of the things I have noticed with the R 2.15.0 RC and --as-cran is
that the I have to bump the version number of the working copy of my
packages immediately after putting a version on CRAN, or I get an
message about version suitability. This is probably a good thing for
packages that I have changed, compared with my old habit of bumping the
version number at arbitrary times, although the mechanics are a nuisance
because I do not actually want to commit to the next version number at
that point. For packages that I have not changed it is a bit worse,
because I have to change the version number even though I have not yet
made any changes to the package. This will mean, for example, that on
R-forge it will look like there is a slightly newer version, even though
there is not really.

I am curious how other developers approach this. Is it better to not
specify --as-cran most of the time? My feeling is that it is better to
specify it all of the time so that I catch errors sooner rather than
later, but maybe there is a better solution?

--as-cran is modelled rather closely after the CRAN incoming checks.
CRAN checks if a new version has a new version number. Of course, you
can ignore its result if you do not want to submit. The idea of using
--as-cran is to apply it before you actually submit. Some parts require
network connection etc.

Uwe

Yes but, for example, will R-forge run checks with --as-cran, and thus
give warnings for any package unchanged from the one on CRAN, or run
without --as-cran, and thus not give a true indication of whether the
package is good to submit?

(No doubt R-forge will customise more, but I am trying to work out a
strategy for my own automatic testing.)

Paul

Paul

On 12-03-27 07:52 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

CRAN has for some time had a policies page at
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html
and we would like to draw this to the attention of package maintainers.
In particular, please

- always send a submission email to CRAN at r-project.org with the package
name and version on the subject line. Emails sent to individual members
of the team will result in delays at best.

- run R CMD check --as-cran on the tarball before you submit it. Do
this with the latest version of R possible: definitely R 2.14.2,
preferably R 2.15.0 RC or a recent R-devel. (Later versions of R are
able to give better diagnostics, e.g. for compiled code and especially
on Windows. They may also have extra checks for recently uncovered
problems.)

Also, please note that CRAN has a very heavy workload (186 packages
were
published last week) and to remain viable needs package maintainers to
make its life as easy as possible.

Kurt Hornik
Uwe Ligges
Brian Ripley