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

[Rowe, Brian Lee Yung (Portfolio Analytics)]

Good to know. I know that other software projects (whether languages,
OSes, applications) tend to keep recent versions in maintenance mode for
a certain period of time prior to "retiring them". I wonder if that
would happen with R, either by design or out of necessity of an
increasing user base.

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Lumley [mailto:tlumley at u.washington.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 12:50 PM
To: Rowe, Brian Lee Yung (Portfolio Analytics)
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] Software lifecycle for R releases (aka practical limits
of support for older versions)


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R. Many packages will become seriously outdated much faster than base R.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



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