On Jun 7, 2012, at 7:49 AM, Matthew Dowle wrote:
>> 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?
You are expected to run the latest patch version of your major.minor R version
(ideally, you should be running the latest release but you don't have to if you
are ok with getting no updates).
> 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.
>
Packages are specific to the major.minor version, we don't guarantee any
compatibility across non-patch versions, i.e. you cannot expect package binary
for R 2.15.0 to work in R 2.14.2 or vice versa. If you have R x.y.z then you
are asking for binaries for R x.y.* - in your case you're running 2.14.2 so you
get the latest build of the package for R 2.14.*. Have a look at CRAN, e.g.
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/
you will see separate packages for every x.y version of R.
Cheers,
Simon
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