[R-pkg-devel] (Not) Reporting minimum R version in DESCRIPTION Depends Field

   I'd add: as far as I know CRAN policy would only require you to
report the minimum version if your package would fail on one of the
older R versions that CRAN still tests (at present I think this goes
back to 3.5.2).  For regular package developers (i.e.  without the
resources of RStudio) it's a nuisance to install lots of old versions of
R just to find out how far back your package actually works.

IMO it's a
little bit obnoxious (albeit maybe unintentionally so) to prevent users
who are stuck with earlier versions from using your package without a
good reason.
  (For this reason I try to save RData files that are included in my
packages with version=2 so that users with R <3.5.0 aren't left out ...)

  Unless you know that your package depends on features introduced in a
particular version of R, I'd leave it out.  If you find out later from
users that it breaks on earlier versions, and you can't find a way to
enable its use on earlier versions, you can add the dependency in a
later release.

 Ben Bolker

On 2019-07-26 10:20 a.m., Hadley Wickham wrote:

I no longer believe this to be good advice - I think you should only
declare a specific dependency if you want to strongly assert that your
package works with those versions. For example, all tidyverse versions
depend on R 3.2 and later, because we test on all those versions.

Hadley

On Friday, July 26, 2019, Jarrett Phillips <phillipsjarrett1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

Hello,

Numerous CRAN packages report minimum R versions within the Depends field
of the DESCRIPTION file.

Is this reporting always necessary?

Hadley Wickham's book "R Packages" states:

"You can also use Depends to require a specific version of R, e.g.
Depends: R
(>= 3.0.1) . As with packages, it?s a good idea to play it safe and require
a version greater than or equal to the version you?re currently using.
devtools::create()  will do this for you."

devtools::check() doesn't warn about not specifying R version, so I am just
curious.


Thanks.

Cheers,

Jarrett

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