-----Original Message-----
From: Spencer Graves [mailto:spencer.graves at prodsyse.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 12:22 PM
To: William Dunlap
Cc: Matthew Dowle; r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Rd] CRAN policies
On 3/29/2012 11:29 AM, William Dunlap wrote:
Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On
Of Matthew Dowle
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 10:41 AM
To: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Rd] CRAN policies
William Dunlap<wdunlap<at> tibco.com> writes:
-----Original Message-----
The survival package has a similar special case: the routines for
expected population survival are set up to accept multiple types of date
format so have lines like
if (class(x) == 'chron') { y<- as.numeric(x - chron("01/01/1960")}
This leaves me with two extraneous "no visible binding" messages.
Suppose we defined a function like
NO_VISIBLE_BINDING(expr) expr
and added an entry to the stuff in codetools so that it
would not check for misspelled object names in call to
NO_VISIBLE_BINDING. Then Terry could write that line as
if (class(x) == "chron") { y<- as.numeric(x - NO_VISIBLE_BINDING(chron)
and the Notes would disappear.
That's ok for package code, but what about test suites? Say there was a test
on the result of "with(DF,a+b)", you wouldn't want to change the test to "with
(DF,NO_VISIBLE_BINDING(a)+NO_VISIBLE_BINDING(b))" not just because that's long
and onerous, but because that's *changing* the test i.e. introducing a
difference between what's tested and what user code will do.
I don't know if test suites need to be checked for no visible bindings -
if there is a real problem the test ought to fail.
codetools should be able to do special checks for known functions that
do not following the standard evaluation rules . E.g., do not check any
arguments of `~`, do not check the 'expr' argument of with, do not check
the subset or weights arguments of lm.
If a package writer introduces a new function with nonstandard evaluation,
perhaps the package could include some information about the matter
in a file that codetools could could source before running its checks.
This gets my vote -- but I don't have the bandwidth nor authority
to effect the change ;-) Spencer
Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
As others suggested, how about a new category: MEMO. The "no visible binding"
NOTE would be downgraded to MEMO. CRAN maintainers could then ignore MEMOs
more
easily.
What I really like about NOTES is that when new checks are added to R then as a
package maintainer you know you don't have to fix them straight away. If a new
WARNING shows up on r-devel daily checks, however, then you've got some warning
about the WARNING that you need to fix more urgently and may even accelerate a
release. So it's not just about checks when submitting a package, but what
happens afterwards as R itself (and packages in Depends) move on. In other
words, you know you need to fix new NOTES but not as urgently as new WARNINGS.
Matthew