Comment # 6 on bug 993268 from Wolfgang Bauer

(In reply to Pierre Bonamy from comment #5)
> The two packages don't "go together" per se. From what I understand, rkward
> just need to be compiled against the system version of R-base.

It is.

> If I
> understand the comments correctly, I think what triggered the bug what that
> the Leap version 0.6.3 had trouble compiling against the updated R-base
> version, hence a need for an update to 0.6.5?

Yes and no.

Packages in the distribution do not get recompiled/rebuilt when there is an
update of a package they depend on. The main repo is frozen after release.
(this only applies to "normal" openSUSE releases, i.e. Leap; Tumbleweed is a
different story...)

As the R-base update from 3.2 to 3.3 is apparently not fully compatible and
broke rkward, rkward needs to be rebuilt against the updated R-base though.

But 0.6.3 cannot be built with R-base 3.3.x, the build just fails. Hence the
need for an update to 0.6.5 too (from the changelog: "Fix compilation with R
3.3.x")

Regarding the requirements, I don't think they are so strict normally.
And it should not be necessary to rebuild rkward with every R-base update.
But R-base apparently had some incompatible changes between 3.2 and 3.3.

A stricter (versioned) runtime requirement probably would make sense though, to
prevent such problems in the future.

Maybe something similar like we did in the phonon-backend-vlc package?
I.e. something like this:
%requires_ge    R-base
Conflicts:      R-base >  %( echo `rpm -q --queryformat '%{VERSION}'
R-base-devel | cut -f -2 -d .`.99)

This would allow to do minor updates (e.g. 3.3.1 to 3.3.2) to R-base without
having to update rkward as well, but would prevent to use it with major new
versions which is likely to not work.

> Well done for the reactivity on that bug, guys, by the way!!

Actually I submitted the update to rkward to the devel project 2 months ago
already, when I noticed that it fails to build in Factory (because of R-base
3.3).
I submitted it to 42.2 as well recently (because I saw that 42.2 also has
R-base 3.3.1), but I didn't notice that R-base 3.3.1 has been released as
update for 42.1 too...