In general, there are no issues with subminor version upgrades, like going from 3.3.2 to 3.3.3, but there can be compatibility problems when there is a major or minor version upgrade. New minor versions are released about once per year. The current version as of the writing of this document, 3.4.0, has a major version 3, minor version 4, and subminor version 0. In a production environment, we strongly suggest testing new versions of R and packages on a staging server before deploying to a production server. Because the cause of these problems will not be obvious, upgrading R on a server should be done with care. On servers running Linux, it is possible that after an R version upgrade, your R packages will load without trouble, but they might not work correctly, or they might even crash R when used.

You probably don’t need to read the rest of this document unless you want to learn much more about package libraries. If you are using a system like this, you can just reinstall your packages after upgrading R.

This is an inconvenience, but the problem is obvious and it is easy to fix. On most single-user systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux), when you upgrade to a new minor version of R (like 3.3.0 to 3.4.0), R will not find the packages, you will need to reinstall your R packages. The purpose of this document is to explain these problems, and how to fix them. In other cases, R will find the existing packages, but they might not work correctly. In some cases, the new version of R won’t find your existing R packages. When you upgrade to a new version of R on your computer, it’s possible that everything will continue to work without any trouble, but it’s also possible that you’ll run into problems. Upgrading R: package compatibility issues

Upgrade rstudio