> On 07/06/2012 11:40, Matthew Dowle wrote:
>>
>> Prof Ripley wrote :
>>> That Depends line is about source installs.
>>
>> I can't see that documented in either Writing R Extensions or
>> ?install.packages. Is it somewhere else? I thought Depends applied to
>> binaries from CRAN too, which is the default method on Windows and Mac.
>
> That field is documented under the description of a *source* package
> (see the first line of section 1.1, and it is in that section) and is
> simply copied from the source package for binary installs. It is the
> extra line added to the DESCRIPTION file, e.g.
>
> Built: R 2.15.0; x86_64-pc-mingw32; 2012-04-02 09:27:07 UTC; windows
>
> that tells you the version a binary package was built under
> (approximately for R-patched and R-devel), and library() checks.
I'm fairly sure I understand all that. I'm still missing something more
basic probably. Consider the follow workflow :
I look on CRAN at package boot. Its webpage states "Depends R (>=
2.14.0)". I'm a user running R and I know I use 2.14.1, so I think great I
can use it. I install it as follows.
> version
version.string R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22)
> install.packages("boot")
trying URL
'http://cran.ma.imperial.ac.uk/bin/windows/contrib/2.14/boot_1.3-4.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 469615 bytes (458 Kb)
opened URL
downloaded 458 Kb
package boot successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
> require(boot)
Loading required package: boot
Warning message:
package boot was built under R version 2.14.2
>
Does this mean that CRAN maintainers expect me to run the latest version
of the major release I'm using (R 2.14.2 in this case), not the current
release of R (R 2.15.0 currently) as you wrote earlier? If that's the
case I never realised it before, but that seems very reasonable. When I
ran the above just now I expected it to say "package 'boot' was built
under R version 2.15.0". But it didn't, it said 2.14.2. So it seems to
be my misunderstanding.
Matthew
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