Wish list
On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 18:47:52 -0500
Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch@pair.com> wrote:
On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 09:33:10 -0500, you wrote:
I also share your views about namespaces. These have caused numerous problems for me. It would be nice to have more of a mechanism to put "feelers" out to the R user community when major changes are planned.
Changes always show up in r-devel (the main CVS branch, not the mailing list) first. Package developers should be keeping a relatively up to date copy of it around if they're doing things that are likely to break.
I need to do that more often. But sometimes it's hard to know what things I do that are likely to break. That's where there needs to be some other mechanism for user communications.
In Hmisc and Design I reference several functions that were not exported from packages that now use namespaces. There is an elegant solution with the package:::function notation,
I'd recommend avoiding that as much as you can. If things aren't exported from a package, then the package writer is likely to feel free to change them without warning. It's much better to convince the package writer that they missed something in their export list.
That's a good solution in general, but I could see legitimate disagreements about what should be exported, so this will not always solve the problem.
but I have been unable to use this solution because I use one code base for all versions of R and S-Plus. This notation generates syntax errors in all but late versions of R.
I think it's reasonable to restrict the availability of updates to your packages to the currently released R version. There are reasons why people might not be up to date (e.g. only doing upgrades at a specific time of year), but they'll still have access via CRAN to older versions of your package. Compatibility with S-PLUS is a lot harder, of course.
Yes that's the real problem. Thanks Duncan -Frank
Duncan Murdoch
---
Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University