Wishlist: 'quietly' argument for .onAttach() / .First.lib()
On Thu, 13 Apr 2006, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On Thu, 13 Apr 2006, Peter Ruckdeschel wrote:
Hi R-devels, in "Writing R extensions" as well as in the help to .onAttach(), you mention that one could use this function to issue a start-up message/banner for the package. My little wish for Easter: a 'quietly'-type argument for .onAttach() / .First.lib() which is passed through by functions require() and library() respectively, and by means of which one could optionally suppress this start-up message/banner . Is this hard to do?
I believe so (and think we have been here before). The documented call
sequence is
.onLoad(libname, pkgname)
.onAttach(libname, pkgname)
the same as .First.lib. There is no way to add an argument here, as many
existing packages do not support it. Beyond that, how would you pass the
argument in? Namespaces and packages are often loaded/attached implicitly
as a result of loading other packages.
I did think you could make use of an option to decide whether to the print
the message or not, but I have always assumed that those who did want a
banner probably did not want it suppressed.
If the .onAttach() used message() instead of cat()
to display the banner message then you could use
suppressMessages(require("randomForest"))
to squelch the message.
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Bill Dunlap
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