R SIG Debian - May 2018 - Two questions on r-base-3.5 transition

Dear R debian maintainers!

As maintainer of rkward, I will be affected by the "r-base-3.5"
transition. Could you help me by answering the following two questions?

1) Is there any (upper / lower) time estimate on when 3.5.0 will enter
sid? I have at least one somewhat-important-but-easy-to-fix-issue
pending for rkward. So far I figured I would delay this until R 3.5.0
has entered sid, and I need to make a new upload, anyway. Now I'm
starting to wonder, how much delay that will actually mean.

2) In principle, rkward will build fine for anything from R 3.0.0
upwards, and it is not hard to support this in the debian packaging
(with appropriate deps, of course). I am wondering, whether or not this
is a good idea wrt to the transition, though. Should I make my next
upload build-depend on r-base-core >= 3.5.0, or should I keep it
flexible?

Regards
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

On 2 May 2018 at 22:27, Thomas Friedrichsmeier wrote:
| Dear R debian maintainers!
| 
| As maintainer of rkward, I will be affected by the "r-base-3.5"
| transition. Could you help me by answering the following two questions?
| 
| 1) Is there any (upper / lower) time estimate on when 3.5.0 will enter
| sid? I have at least one somewhat-important-but-easy-to-fix-issue
| pending for rkward. So far I figured I would delay this until R 3.5.0
| has entered sid, and I need to make a new upload, anyway. Now I'm
| starting to wonder, how much delay that will actually mean.

I think nobody really knows. We discussed this a little in the debian-r list,
and it now depends on the release team who are managing the transition.

It may well be weeks.
 
| 2) In principle, rkward will build fine for anything from R 3.0.0
| upwards, and it is not hard to support this in the debian packaging
| (with appropriate deps, of course). I am wondering, whether or not this
| is a good idea wrt to the transition, though. Should I make my next
| upload build-depend on r-base-core >= 3.5.0, or should I keep it
| flexible?

I think for the _source code in the repo_ I would keep flexible. But for
_binary_ packages in Debian unstable I usually set the R version used.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org