[R-pkg-devel] Semantic versioning and maintenance releases

I think this would make life harder for CRAN and for other developers,
so it's unlikely to happen.
For example, suppose both yourpackage 1.6.3 and 1.7.0 are active on
CRAN, and mypackage declares that it depends on yourpackage.  Then if I
upload an update to mypackage, which version of yourpackage does CRAN
install when testing my update?  It would have to test both.

Thanks for all the replies. I can see that the monotonic ordering is
in-built to support the latest / best version model that CRAN has. That
said it would be great if the policy could be relaxed to allow uploading
older versions which don't necessarily become the "best" version.
Then we could ask users to use versions[1] and run something like do
`install.versions('mypackage', '1.6.3')` if they really want to be in the
1.6.x series.

Thanks
Shivaram

[1] https://github.com/goldingn/versions

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 1:05 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:

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

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

      [[alternative HTML version deleted]]