[Gretl-devel] Re: towards packages with R in the background
On Sat, 26 Oct 2019, Sven Schreiber wrote:
I would like to "ping" on this issue - the idea is that we
would need to
have this in place before 2019d is released (or will it be 2020a?), such
that contributed packages can start relying on this extension next year.
Otherwise it couldn't be used before 2020a (or even 2020b) comes out.
I'm pretty sure we'll have a 2019d, though that's by the way.
I've begun thinking about representation of R requirements in the
spec file for a contributed package. Seems to me the information
should probably be in a single line, something like
R-depends = R >= 3.4.3, glmnet >= 1.9-9
If we're just going to print the stuff to the right of the first '='
as part of a warning when a user fires up a relevant package, easy
enough. Parsing and checking it would not be so easy. The 3-number R
versions we could handle, but R package versioning is a mess: a
hodge-podge of Major.Minor, Major.Minor.Patch and Major.Minor-Patch
(maybe plus other forms?).
Should we allow for listing multiple known-good versions (of R
itself or R packages)? I think I'd prefer just the ">=" notation,
with the proviso (in the warning text) that we can't guarantee that
later versions will still work, although that should be a reasonable
expectation.
Allin