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almahmoud commented Oct 27, 2025

The latest commit adds _devel and -$TARGETARCH as suffixes to the BIOCONDUCTOR_NAME env variable.

Why _devel?
In the past we have built and pushed devel and release binaries under the same name, leading to them sharing the same directory in a bucket (eg: see 3.21 bucket). When moving to a new cycle, this effectively meant that the release binaries replace the devel binaries in the directory (previously deleting the old devel binaries completely, but with newer build method having them co-exist in the bucket). This puts users of old devel containers who haven't updated yet in the position of either a) inadvertently pulling binaries from the new release, because of the version bump making new release binaries take precedence, which could especially be problematic if an OS change occurred during the release process rendering them incompatible or b) force them to go back to compiling from source until they upgrade their devel containers.
With Bioconductor/BiocManager#199 having been merged (originally only to allow a path forward for arm64 binaries), adding the _devel prefix in the name for devel containers will also allow us to separate the directories of devel and release binaries in the bucket that hosts these binaries, and thus avoid this problem altogether, keeping backwards compatibility for devel container binaries even post-release.

Why -$TARGETARCH?
This creates a path for arm64 pre-compiled binaries, but also makes it easier for arm64 containers to never inadvertently use the amd64 binaries, even if the container binaries env variable is accidentally set to true (eg if using an existing script that sets it). This argument is automatically defined by docker during the build process, from the --platform argument.

If this change seems desirable, I would merge it with the release bump before rebuilding the binaries. @LiNk-NY @vjcitn any thoughts?

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vjcitn commented Oct 28, 2025

I am on board with these changes.

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