[SPARKR][BUILD] AppVeyor change to latest R version

[felixcheung]

What changes were proposed in this pull request?

R version update

How was this patch tested?

AppVeyor

[HyukjinKwon]

LGTM if the tests pass

[HyukjinKwon]

@felixcheung, BTW, I think optionally we could also consider setting it 3.4.0 a bit more conservatively for now. There was a rather minor problem for using the latest version (see #15709) due to sync'ing issue of R version, which was fixed within few hours outside Spark IIRC. Either way is fine to me.

[felixcheung]

It's the latest but it's not new - 3.4.1 was release a month ago. I think there shouldn't be the sync problem.

[SparkQA]

Test build #80291 has finished for PR 18856 at commit 2449e7e.

• This patch passes all tests.
• This patch merges cleanly.
• This patch adds no public classes.

[HyukjinKwon]

Ah, I meant, the PR I linked actually describes a case when we were using 3.3.1 but it was broken after 3.3.2 release. The reason was, 3.3.2 was released but 3.3.2 for Windows was not synced (but was synced after few hours).

The script we are using checks if it is latest or not and adds ../old/.. part to build the download link correctly. So..

• Check given version is latest via https://rversions.r-pkg.org/r-release
  • If so, don't add ../old/.., e.g., https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/R-3.3.1-win.exe
  • if not, add ../old/.., e.g., https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/3.3.1/R-3.3.1-win.exe

But, the issue was, https://rversions.r-pkg.org/r-release gives 3.3.2 after the release but 3.3.1 for WIndows was not in old repo as the latest.

[HyukjinKwon]

To cut this short, it was ...

• 3.3.2 release for Linux only
• Gives the latest as 3.3.2 and the download link for 3.3.1 becomes windows/base/old
• 3.3.2 release for WIndows yet
• 3.3.1 is still not in windows/base/old but windows/base
• Failed to download

This should be minor anyway and I think usually they should be synced quite soon.

[HyukjinKwon]

@felixcheung, actually, should we try to replace http://rversions.r-pkg.org/r-release in line 29 to http://rversions.r-pkg.org/r-release-win? I referred krlmlr/r-appveyor@01ce943

[HyukjinKwon]

Will try to open a separate PR. LGTM.

[HyukjinKwon]

Merged to master.

[felixcheung]

Right, this PR isn't changing how you have made the version to test with sticky - we won't still pick up the latest automatically, which is fine for now. But we should bump (manually) to the later/latest version in one of the test matrix to make sure it works.

[HyukjinKwon]

I agree this PR should be okay alone, which fixes what it targets for now and I realised my suggestion is rather an extra bit. I opened another one for replacing r-release to r-release-win.