R version compatibilitySimilar to rkward_min_version and rkward_max_version, the <dependencies> element allows specification of the attributes R_min_version and R_max_version. However, there are the following differences:
Plugins which fail to meet the R version requirement are not currently skipped when reading a
.pluginmapfile. The user can still call the plugin, and will not see any immediate warning (in future versions, a warning message will probably be shown)In consequence it is also not possible to define alternative versions of a plugin depending on the running version of R.
However, it is often easy to achieve backwards compatibility as shown below. If you are aware of R compatibility issues, please consider using this method, instead of defining a dependency on a particular version of R.
In many cases, it is easily possible to provide reduced functionality, if a certain feature is not available in the running version of R. Consider the following short example of a plugin .xml file:
<dialog [...]> <logic> <dependency_check id="ris210" R_min_version="2.10.0"/> <connect client="compression.xz.enabled" governor="ris210"/> </logic> [...] <radio id="compression" label="Compression method"> <option label="None" value=""> <option label="gzip" value="gzip"> <option id="xz" label="xz" value="xz"> </radio> [...] </dialog>
In this example the compression option "xz" will simply be disabled when the R runtime version is older than 2.10.0 (which did not support xz compression). The <dependency_check> element supports the same attributes as the <dependencies> element in .pluginmap files. It creates a boolean property, which is true, if the specified dependencies are met, false otherwise.