R evolves every year. Each update brings many bug fixes and
performance improvements, but also sometimes changes the default value
of some parameters (such as switching from
stringsAsFactors = TRUE to FALSE in R
4.0.0).
While there is benefit in supporting older R versions, doing so adds maintenance burden, especially in a large ecosystem like easystats that contains 10 packages that are supposed to seamlessly work together. Therefore, easystats is supported (meaning each package is thoroughly tested) on the current R version, the future one (R-devel) and the previous five versions.
The current planned release schedule for large R updates is once a year in Spring. Accordingly, this table shows the corresponding latest R version and the oldest supported version:
| Year | Latest R version | Oldest supported R version |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 4.3 | 3.5 |
| 2024 | 4.4 | 3.6 |
| 2025 | 4.5 | 4.0 |
| 2026 | 4.6 | 4.1 |
| 2027 | 4.7 | 4.2 |
| 2028 | 4.8 | 4.3 |
(Of course, if the R release schedule changes or R releases a “5.0” version, the numbers in the table will change.)
Implications
The implications are simple:
If you are a user and your R version is below the oldest supported one, you must update it to use the easystats packages. Alternatively, you can also download a version of the package that is compatible with your R version from the CRAN archive and then install it locally. Finally, the package remotes gives a way to install an old version of a package. For instance,
remotes::install_version("insight", version = "0.10.0")installs a version of insight that is compatible with R 3.5.0.If you are a developer and your package depends on one of the easystats packages, the oldest version that your package supports corresponds to the oldest version supported by easystats. Note that this should be reflected in your DESCRIPTION file with
Depends: R (>= x.y.z).