Message-ID: <21043.7886.743370.944182@max.nulle.part>
Date: 2013-09-13T14:18:54Z
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel
Subject: declaring package dependencies
In-Reply-To: <52331857.8090904@gmail.com>
On 13 September 2013 at 09:51, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| Changes are generally announced in the NEWS.Rd file long before release,
| but R-devel is an unreleased version, so you won't see the news until it
| is there. Announcing things that nobody can try leads to fewer useful
| comments than putting them into R-devel where at least people can see
| what is really happening.
That comment makes sense _in theory_.
Yet _in practice_ it does not as many of us have been shot down by tests in
R-devel which had been implemented within a 48 hour window of the package
submission.
Absent a time machine or psychic powers, I do not see how package developers
can reasonably be expected to cope with this.
I am not close to Python, but the little I know about their PEP system makes
me think that a process in which changes are first announced as concepts,
then discussed and refined and only thereafter implemented seems somewhat
appealing.
Dirk
--
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com