From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Mar 27 17:41:45 2012
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:41:45 +0100
Subject: [Rd] CRAN policies
In-Reply-To: <4F71CBE5.6090300@gmail.com>
References: <4F71A2F3.2000203@stats.ox.ac.uk>
	<4F71AA0A.9050702@stats.ox.ac.uk> <4F71CBE5.6090300@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4F71DFB9.6010109@stats.ox.ac.uk>

On 27/03/2012 15:17, 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?

Yes.  It is only recommended for use just before submission.  It is not 
used by the CRAN daily checks, for example.

All it does it set some environment variables that you can also set in 
~/.R/check.Renviron, scripts ... and that is what the CRAN team do.  We 
introduced --as-cran to make it easier to explain to submitters how to 
get the check results we reported [*].

As for what the set is, read 'R Internals' or the code (it will vary by 
R version).

Given that we get several submissions per week with the same version 
number or name as a package already on CRAN, we do need submitters to 
run the 'incoming' check before submission.

[*] Since answering several emails a day about why their results were 
different was taking up far too much time.

>
> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] CRAN policies
Prof Brian Ripley