[R] Recommended way of requiring packages of a certain version?

[Allan Engelhardt]

On 16/07/10 09:32, Paul Hiemstra wrote:
> Hi Allan,
>
> When you create an R package you can specify in the DESCRIPTION file 
> that your package depends on a certain R version and versions of 
> packages. For example:
> [...]
> Depends: R (>= 2.7.0), methods, sp (>= 0.9-4), gstat (>= 0.9-58)

Thanks Paul, this is helpful.  It doesn't quite do what I want because 
support for operators other than `>=` is erratic (the documentation at 
[1] seems to suggest that R CMD INSTALL supports any operator while 
install.packages() only supports `>=`).

Also I am not sure if it is checked on every package load?

> [...]
> So distributing code to other people is preferably done using R 
> packages, which gives you this option.

Agreed in principle (and that is kind of what I am developing), but 
sometimes you just want to send a piece of analysis you are working on.

But thanks for the pointer.


Allan

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#fn-2