On 5 March 2024 at 11:56, Duncan Murdoch wrote: | I have mixed feelings about r-universe. On the one hand, it is really | nicely put together, and it offers the service described above. On the | other, it's probably a bad idea to follow its advice and use | install.packages() with `repos` as shown: that will install development | versions of packages, not releases.
Yup. It's a point I raised right at the start as I really do believe in curated releases but clearly a lot of people prefer the simplicity of 'tagging a release' at GitHub and then getting a build. r-universe is indeed good at what it does and reliable. There are limited choices in 'driving' what you can do with it. We rely quite heavily on it in a large project for work. As each 'repo' can appear only once in a universe, we resorted to having the 'offical' build follow GitHub 'releases', as well as (optional, additional) builds against a the main branch from another universe. This example is for a non-CRAN package. With CRAN packages, r-universe can be useful too. For some of my packages, I now show multiple 'badges' at the README: for the released CRAN version as well as for the current 'rc' in the main branch sporting a differentiating final digit. RcppArmadillo had a pre-releases available to test that way for a few weeks til the new release this week. So in effect, this gives you what `drat` allows yet also automagically adds builds. It's quite useful when you are careful about it. | Do you know if it's possible for a package to suggest the CRAN version | first, with an option like the above only offered as a pre-release option? In the language of Debian and its dpkg and tools, one solution to that would be 'repository pinning' to declare a 'value' on a repository. There, the default is 500, and e.g. for r2u I set this to 700 as you usually want its versions. We do not have this for R, but it could be added (eventually) as a new value in PACKAGES, or as a new supplementary attribute. Dirk -- dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
