If users are 'playing by the books' and using BiocManager::install(), the version of R is coupled with the version of Bioconductor / your package, so specifying an R version is irrelevant. In addition, saying your package has a dependency R >=... implies that there will be no breaking changes in some future R, which requires a certain amount of foresight. And using R itself would seem to be a requirement for an R package. So in principle my feeling is that it doesn't make sense to include R or an R version as a dependency.
In a more practical setting it might be that your package depends on a specific feature of R, or that you yourself are only confident that a particular version of R will provide the needs of your package. It might then be appropriate to specify that R version. Again in the domain of the ideal, new R features would be introduced in R-devel, with bug fixes only in the point releases. So a dependency like R >= 3.5.0 would seem appropriate. I'm not sure whether these comments are helpful or not... __ Martin On 11/2/18, 3:19 PM, "Bioc-devel on behalf of Paul Shannon" <bioc-devel-boun...@r-project.org on behalf of paul.thurmond.shan...@gmail.com> wrote: A user of MotifDb requests - sensibly, I think - that I loosen the requirement Depends: R (>= 3.5.1) which I added before the release. This seems sensible and supported by, for example, R (>= 2.10) in GenomicRanges. Is this, then, the heuristic? - new packages should depend on the lastest release of R - older existing packages should depend on earlier versions of R, possibly sticking with the version of R in which they originally appeared, as long as they have not been subsequently modified to use new R features. - Paul _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel