S4 packages and .Rdata file.
Witold Eryk Wolski wrote:
Dear developers. Have spend just 1 h searching for a bug in a new version of a new version of a package. I was getting a segfault all the time. "Funny" thing - there was no error neither in the S nor in the C code. To solve the problem I had to delete the .Rdata file! What I observed. If the .Rdata file was generated while a previous release of a package was installed in the .Rdata file the S4 classes and methods definition are stored for some reasons. It may be of course that I have sourced the method definition what would explain why they are in .Rdata. More interestingly is that even if loading a new version of a package with library(msbase) the function definitions stored in .Rdata precede the methods of the newly loaded package in the search path. They are called instead of the new method definitions (?).
When you save a workspace image, that includes method definitions done
in the global environment (as you would certainly want it to). The
objects have special names in order to follow the "metadata" semantics
in "Programming with Data" and also not to conflict with ordinary objects.
If you _don't_ want to save methods for function "f", use
removeMethods("f") before saving and quitting.
To find out what functions have methods defined in the global
environment, use getGenerics(1). Then you can use removeMethods() for
those functions & resave the workspace image.
If the function "f" has methods in other packages as well, use
removeMethods("f", all=FALSE)
to remove only the methods object in the global environment.
And if you like the grubby but direct approach, do
objects(all=TRUE)
which will show methods lists as objects with names starting with
".__M__". You can remove those objects using the list= argument to rm().
So If I wass calling what I thought is the new version of the method the old method stored months ago in the .Rdata file was called again and again. Is not there a better way to avoid such problems than deleting the .Rdata file? Eryk