Detailed description |
Hi,
R-Forge builds and checks packages against dependencies available on CRAN. That is sub-optimal for a development system where new versions of packages are being developed, especially for R-Forge projects where there are multiple packages that depend on each other.
In the Vegan project for example, we have several packages, two of which (permute and vegan) depend on one another (vegan depends on permute). I recently updated permute which broke vegan, but I also updated vegan to use permute properly and in doing so changed it's dependency to permute (>= 0.7-4). Both package build and check fine together on my linux machine, but vegan refuses to build on R-Forge because permute (>= 0.7-4) is not available on CRAN (which it shouldn't be as it is an in-progress development version).
See: https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=68
It would be most useful if R-Forge could have it's own library path containing builds that pass checks on R-Forge, plus a CRAN library path that it currently has. That way if a package is updated on R-Forge and builds OK, it is installed to the R-Forge library path and is used for checking.
Otherwise, development builds of vegan won't be available via R-Forge until such a time as we release permute to CRAN (but that would break the CRAN version of vegan), or we are ready to release both packages to CRAN simultaneously.
Thanks
Gavin |
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