I want to use regutools to access some gene regulation information from E. coli. The original paper describing regutools (doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa575) mentions that:

the regutools implementation allows users to explore different versions of the RegulonDB database

However, I am having trouble understanding how this is done from the package. I initially thought that the database_version parameter of the regulondb() constructor function would be used to specify what version of the database one wanted to use. However, upon closer inspection of the source code I noticed that database_version is simply used to fill the corresponding slot of the new regulondb object, but it isn't actually used to query the server (in other words, it is a user-supplied metadata string that doesn't do anything in practice):

regulondb <-
    function(database_conn,
    organism,
    genome_version,
    database_version) {
        stopifnot(is(database_conn, "SQLiteConnection"))
        stopifnot(is(organism, "character"))
        stopifnot(is(genome_version, "character"))
        stopifnot(is(database_version, "character"))
        new(
            "regulondb",
            database_conn,
            organism = organism,
            genome_version = genome_version,
            database_version = database_version
        )
    }

So, given that this cannot be done with regulondb(), I went up one step and checked the connect_database() function, which is used to create the SQLiteConnection that must be supplied as first parameter to regulondb() . However, when checking the source code for connect_database(), I noticed that the function always looks for regulondb v10.8 and there is no way for the user to specify a different version. This goes to the point that, if connect_database() cannot find regulondb v10.8 in the provided AnnotationHub object, then it forces the download of regulondb v10.8 from an online dropbox folder:

connect_database <-
    function(
    ah = AnnotationHub::AnnotationHub(),
    bfc = BiocFileCache::BiocFileCache()) {
        if (!is.null(ah)) {
            ## Check input
            stopifnot(methods::is(ah, "AnnotationHub"))

            ## Query AH
            q <-
                AnnotationHub::query(
                    ah,
                    pattern = c(
                        paste(
                            "RegulonDB SQLite database version v10.8",
                            "for the regutools Bioconductor package"
                        ),
                        "regutools;RegulonDB;v10.8"
                    )
                )
            if (length(q) == 1) {
                ## Return the connection
                return(q[[1]])
            }
        }


        ## Otherwise, use the Dropbox version and cache it with BiocFileCache
        url <-
            paste0("https://www.dropbox.com/s/ufp6wqcv5211v1w/",
            "regulondb_v10.8_sqlite.db?dl=1"
            )
        destfile <- BiocFileCache::bfcrpath(bfc, url)
        AnnotationDbi::dbFileConnect(destfile)
    }

...and then I gave up. I am at a complete loss as to how a user can "explore different versions of the RegulonDB database" given that regutools seems to always look for v10.8, and the database_version parameter doesn't seem to be doing anything. Am I missing something very obvious?

Any help appreciated.