R-3.4.0 works

[slowkow]

I tried R-3.4.0, and it seems that everything works OK so far.

At some institutions, it's not easy to update to the latest R version. I think many users will appreciate the ability to install this package on R-3.4.

[codecov-io]

Codecov Report

Merging #124 into master will not change coverage.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##           master     #124   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   43.56%   43.56%           
=======================================
  Files          13       13           
  Lines        2043     2043           
=======================================
  Hits          890      890           
  Misses       1153     1153

---

Continue to review full report at Codecov.

Legend - Click here to learn more
Δ = absolute <relative> (impact), ø = not affected, ? = missing data
Powered by Codecov. Last update 0140fa8...bb329d6. Read the comment docs.

[federicomarini]

Kamil, it works indeed. But since we are preparing this package for the upcoming Bioconductor release, there is the need of developing against R-devel for this cycle.
Not to mention the fact that the Bioconductor version of some packages might have different APIs, so some functionality might be different/broken.

One workaround would be to clone the repo, change the line in the DESCRIPTION, and install locally. But for this, we cannot guarantee it will work as in the unmodified version. Anyway this pain will be gone once the package is (hopefully soon!) reviewed and accepted in Bioc.

[slowkow]

Thanks for the comment! I had a hunch it was due to Bioconductor.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder if you could help me understand.

Is it true that you could simultaneously use R-3.5 in your development environment AND keep the text R (>= 3.4) in the DESCRIPTION file?

Does Bioconductor require that you set the DESCRIPTION file to 3.5? The instructions at the Bioconductor website aren't clear to me. I guess I'm confused about the requirements for matching Bioconductor versions and R versions.

[federicomarini]

Does Bioconductor require that you set the DESCRIPTION file to 3.5? The instructions at the Bioconductor website aren't clear to me. I guess I'm confused about the requirements for matching Bioconductor versions and R versions.

As far as I can remember, it is not required but rather recommended. I think it is even one thing that gets checked via BiocCheck.
The thing is, Bioconductor versions are tightly connected to R versions. Keeping the requirement in a strict way in the DESCRIPTION is also a safe mechanism, especially in situations when the package relies on many other dependencies/imports and so on.

[kevinrue]

Federico pretty much covered it all: we are aware that the package seems to run successfully on R-3.4.

However, we have focused our efforts entirely on the next Bioconductor release, which isn't that far.
From the Bioconductor website: https://www.bioconductor.org/developers/package-submission/
"[...] using an appropiate version of R. To work out which version that is, see useDevel."
In our case, that is R 3.5.
I'll open a branch now called 3.4 where I'll downgrade the requirement for users willing to have a play with that (unsupported) version.

Note that that branch will become obsolete at the next Bioconductor release, as R 3.5 will become available as a stable R release.

[kevinrue]

I'm closing this PR as we won't merge it to master.
The 3.4-accessible release can be installed with the following command:

devtools::install_github("csoneson/iSEE", ref = "982646e")