Recent and upcoming changes to R-devel

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 11-07-06 9:25 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Prof Brian Ripley<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
 wrote:

In the near future all packages will have a name space.  If the sources
do
not contain one, a default NAMESPACE file will be added. This again will
simplify the descriptions and also a lot of internal code.  Maintainers
of
packages without name spaces (currently 42% of CRAN) are encouraged to
add
one themselves.

This is great.  However, it would also be great if a user could
disable this for a given package at install time, for example with a
command line argument to R CMD INSTALL.  Use case: in the early stages
of package development I find it incredible useful to not have a
NAMESPACE.  This is of course before I release it to anyone else;
purely for development.

My guess is that this has already been anticipated, but in case not, I
wanted to raise the issue.

I think the idea is to completely remove support for the bad search order
you get when you don't have a namespace.  That search order is a mixed
blessing in debugging:  it makes it easy to replace functions with new
versions, but it also makes it very easy to execute the wrong code if you
happen to have something sitting in the global environment that has a
conflicting name.

It seems like something a front end could do to make assignInNamespace
easier to use to make working with namespaces easier.

Indeed I find this change to be a very welcome addition to R that will
make the life easier for many of us; especially when you are using
someone else's package.

My use case is also not debugging my own code when it is a at a
semi-mature level.  I am addressing the very early stages of
developing a new package.  In my workflow (which may differ from other
people's; but I do think a substantial number would agree with me),
the early stages of development usually entails bringing order to a
number of R scripts; figuring out the structure of the basic objects
as well as the arguments for the important functions/methods.  In this
early stage, almost any evaluation I do at the R prompt is followed by
refactoring some part of the code (and then sourcing it into R).

Once the code is semi-matured (after the first couple of weeks), I
don't think I would mind a NAMESPACE at all, but I believe I would
find it very frustrating during the very early development stage
(which I am going through right now for one package and which I went
through a month ago for another package).