{lightgbm} v4.0.0 is coming

[jameslamb]

👋 Hello! I'm James, one of the maintainers of LightGBM.

We were excited to see {EIX} show up as a "reverse suggests" on https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lightgbm/index.html. Thanks so much for enhancing what users can do in R with LightGBM models!

First, I wanted to let you know that the next release of LightGBM (the entire project, including the R package) will be a major version release with significant breaking changes. See this discussion of v4.0.0: https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/issues/5153. We don't have a planned date for that release yet, as we have been struggling from a lack of maintainer attention / activity. But I expect it will be months not weeks from now.

Please open issues at https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/issues if there's anything we could do to make {lightgbm} easier to use with {EIX}.

Second, I wanted to share how you can test this project against {lightgbm}.

REPO_DIR="${HOME}/repos"

# install {EIX}'s Suggests dependencies
cd "${REPO_DIR}/EIX"
Rscript \
    --vanilla \
    -e "devtools::install_dev_deps()"

# build {lightgbm} R package from source and install it
git clone \
    --recursive \
    [email protected]:microsoft/LightGBM.git \
    "${REPO_DIR}/lgb-dev"

cd "${REPO_DIR}/lgb-dev"
sh build-cran-package.sh \
    --no-build-vignettes

R CMD INSTALL \
    --with-keep.source \
    ./lightgbm_*.tar.gz

# run R CMD check
cd "${REPO_DIR}/EIX"
R CMD build .
R CMD check --as-cran ./EIX_*.tar.gz

I'm happy to report that as of the most recent development version of {lightgbm} (https://github.com/microsoft/LightGBM/commit/44fe591a60d7427d64997c37b22768a92c97c47b), R CMD check doesn't show any issues for this package! That probably means that the v4.0.0 release of {lightgbm} won't lead to check failures for this project on CRAN.

However, since this project does not have any unit tests, it's still possible that parts of {EIX} are incompatible with {lightgbm} or may become incompatible as additional changes are merged in the development version. I recommend setting up some automated tests that test the package against a development version of {lightgbm}, or at a minimum occasionally manually running something like the commands I provided.

[jameslamb]

You can close this issue if you'd like, I just wanted to open it as a way to communicate these plans and prepare you for the upcoming release of {lightgbm}.

@ me any time if you have questions or need help!