[R] Software lifecycle for R releases (aka practical limits of support for older versions)

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Rowe, Brian Lee Yung (Portfolio Analytics) wrote:

> Does anyone have thoughts on the lifecycle of older releases of R? I
> know that currently the 2.8.x and 2.9.x releases seem to be actively
> "supported" on the mailing lists, but what about older releases, say
> 2.4.x? Curious to hear when people think older versions of R become
> obsolete and unsupportable on the lists (or other venues).

Opinions vary, but:

- reporting bugs (or asking if something is a bug) based on any older version of R than 2.9.x would likely get you flamed.

- if your problem could be solved by updating to the current version, I think you would be expected to do so.

My personal feeling is that you can just about get away with updating R only annually. Since you can easily keep an archive of previous versions available, there's no need to avoid updating on that account.

Based just on R itself a longer update delay might be ok, but CRAN doesn't supply binaries of new or updated packages for old versions of R. Many packages will become seriously outdated much faster than base R.

     -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle