[patch] giving library() a 'version' argument
On 4/12/12 1:56 PM, "Ken Williams" <Ken.Williams at windlogics.com> wrote:
On April 12, 2012 1:48 PM, Paul Roebuck wrote:
Not sure I follow you here. The packageVersion() method is essentially a
shortcut to packageDescription("MyPackage")$Version. I generally avoid
doing package upgrades in my scripts so the loaded package IS the installed
package (even when playing .libPaths() tricks).
The scenario is:
library(PackageX) # Quietly loads version 1 of PackageY
# Try to load a specific version of PackageY
.libPaths('directory/containing/PackageY/version-2')
library(PackageY) # actually does nothing, since it's already loaded
stopifnot(packageVersion('PackageY') >= 2) # ??
The intention of the stopifnot() expression is to make sure version 2 is
loaded.
If packageVersion() goes & looks for PackageY in .libPaths() even when the
package is already loaded, it will provide the wrong answer - because it will
find version 2, but version 1 is what's loaded. However, if packageVersion()
checks the version of what's already loaded, then it would do the right thing
here.
I don't think the docs for packageDescription() clarify what happens in this
case, but I could be missing it.
If you're going to "play" with .libPaths() like that, it should be done prior to ANY libraries being loaded. Going about the style you do below, you'd need to parse sessionInfo() instead. packageVersion() as well as packageDescription() give you the information based on the first package in the path with the same name. If you dynamically change the path, the returned information could be different...