Hugo Gruson and Maelle Salmon show how to set a minimum version of R itself in a package:
There have been much talk and many blog posts about R package dependencies. Yet, one special dependency is more rarely mentioned, even though all packages include it: the dependency on R itself. The same way you can specify a dependency on a package, and optionally on a specific version, you can add a dependency to a minimum R version in the
DESCRIPTIONfile of your package. In this post we shall explain why and how.
Read on for that explanation, as well as a lot of depth on why you might choose a particular R version, popular R versions (at least by number of packages), and what some of the largest maintainers do.