On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Kurt Hornik wrote:
I had asked about multiple version (and also platform) support several
times during the past few years, and had always been told that this was
not necessary. So why does this keep coming up?
One can add a version layer, but one has to do this right. Patterning
after the Emacs model is wrong. Binary incompatabilities were pointed
out, so
PREFIX/lib/R/VERSION
PREFIX/lib/R/site
is not good enough. Emacs has added [the equivalent of]
PREFIX/lib/R/site/VERSION
but that requires external control of version dependency at install
time. We actually have the required info through the DESCRIPTION db,
hence could take care of this.
Are you sure we have the right info? We know if a package is
source-incompatible with old versions of R but we may not know if it
is binary-incompatible with new versions. I was surprised to find
that survival seems to be binary-incompatible between 1.2.3 and 1.3.0
-- at least, several bugs went away when I recompiled with pre1.3.0