From tlumley@u.washington.edu  Fri Jun  1 16:11:33 2001
From: tlumley@u.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 08:11:33 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Rd] R-1.2.3: a small suggestion (PR#961)
In-Reply-To: <15127.13646.122849.533320@mithrandir.hornik.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.33.0106010809200.138058-100000@homer09.u.washington.edu>

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

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley@u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

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[Rd] R-1.2.3: a small suggestion (PR#961)
Thomas Lumley