Can you please let me know the End of Life and End of Vendor Support dates for CRAN R for Windows 3.6.3? Thank you. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
On 18/09/2020 1:39 p.m., Shapira, Leeor via R-help wrote:> Can you please let me know the End of Life and End of Vendor Support dates for CRAN R for Windows 3.6.3? Thank you.R doesn't have either of those. There is no vendor support ever. It is free software; it is up to its users to support it. On the other hand, it is free software, so you can use it forever. In practice, there is de facto support from its authors in that they are very responsive to bug reports. That ends with the next release, so 3.6.3 support ended in April, 2020 when R 4.0.0 was released. Another way to think of support and end of life equivalents is to ask how long CRAN will provide the source code to packages for it. There are no time limits on that, though it can be some work to find a set and tools to build them if you are using older releases. And finally, you might want to know how long CRAN will keep updating binary packages for R 3.6.3. I think that should continue until the release of R 4.1.0, sometime around April 2021. Duncan Murdoch
If you have production code written in R that make it expensive to even consider upgrading to the latest R, it may be worth paying the support fees of an organization like RStudio. Otherwise, I think it make sense to upgrade to the latest version and hope for the best. If you encounter problems, you can ask someplace on StackExchange or one of the R email lists like this or a package maintainer, as Duncan said. Spencer On 2020-09-19 12:44, Duncan Murdoch wrote:> On 18/09/2020 1:39 p.m., Shapira, Leeor via R-help wrote: >> Can you please let me know the End of Life and End of Vendor Support >> dates for CRAN R for Windows 3.6.3? Thank you. > > R doesn't have either of those.? There is no vendor support ever.? It is > free software; it is up to its users to support it.? On the other hand, > it is free software, so you can use it forever. > > In practice, there is de facto support from its authors in that they are > very responsive to bug reports.? That ends with the next release, so > 3.6.3 support ended in April, 2020 when R 4.0.0 was released. > > Another way to think of support and end of life equivalents is to ask > how long CRAN will provide the source code to packages for it.? There > are no time limits on that, though it can be some work to find a set and > tools to build them if you are using older releases. > > And finally, you might want to know how long CRAN will keep updating > binary packages for R 3.6.3.? I think that should continue until the > release of R 4.1.0, sometime around April 2021. > > Duncan Murdoch > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> On Sep 19, 2020, at 1:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: > > On 18/09/2020 1:39 p.m., Shapira, Leeor via R-help wrote: >> Can you please let me know the End of Life and End of Vendor Support dates for CRAN R for Windows 3.6.3? Thank you. > > R doesn't have either of those. There is no vendor support ever. It is free software; it is up to its users to support it. On the other hand, it is free software, so you can use it forever. > > In practice, there is de facto support from its authors in that they are very responsive to bug reports. That ends with the next release, so 3.6.3 support ended in April, 2020 when R 4.0.0 was released. > > Another way to think of support and end of life equivalents is to ask how long CRAN will provide the source code to packages for it. There are no time limits on that, though it can be some work to find a set and tools to build them if you are using older releases. > > And finally, you might want to know how long CRAN will keep updating binary packages for R 3.6.3. I think that should continue until the release of R 4.1.0, sometime around April 2021. > > Duncan MurdochHi, Just to add on to Duncan's comments, you may want to read the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) document here: https://www.r-project.org/certification.html That will give you insights into R's development, release and maintenance timelines. Regards, Marc Schwartz