Hi
I'd like to suggest to make R more informative when a user updates a package A where there's at least one package B that has "LinkingTo: A" in its description.
To illustrate the problem, assume package A is updated so that its C/C++ header interface (in inst/include) is changed. For package B to pick up these changes, we need to reinstall package A. In extreme cases, if B also imports A and uses functions from A's shared library, failure to reinstall B may lead to all sorts of undefined behavior.
I've stumbled over this recently for A = Rcpp 0.12.8 and B = dplyr 0.5.0 [1], with a bug fix available in Rcpp 0.12.8.2. Simply upgrading Rcpp to 0.12.8.2 wasn't enough to propagate the bug fix to dplyr; we need to reinstall dplyr 0.5.0 too.
I've prepared an example with R-devel r71799. The initial configuration [2] is Rcpp 0.12.8 and dplyr 0.5.0. There is no warning from R after upgrading Rcpp to 0.12.8.2 [3], and no warning when loading the (now "broken") dplyr 0.5.0 linked against Rcpp 0.12.8 but importing Rcpp 0.12.8.2 [4].
As a remedy, I'd like to suggest that upgrading Rcpp gives a warning about installed packages that are LinkingTo it [3], and that loading dplyr gives a warning that it has been built against a different version of Rcpp [4], just like the warning when packages are built against a different version of R.
Thanks. Best regards Kirill [1] https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/2308#issuecomment-267495075 [2] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L589-L593 [3] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L619-L645 [4] https://travis-ci.org/krlmlr/pkg.upgrade.test#L671-L703 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
