apropos changes in r-devel: intended feature or bug?

Martin Maechler writes:

"DeepS" == Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com>
    on Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:07:27 -0800 writes:

DeepS> The old apropos started with: if
DeepS> (!is.character(what)) what <-
DeepS> as.character(substitute(what))

DeepS> The new one has:

DeepS> if (character.only) stopifnot(is.character(what))
DeepS> else what <- as.character(substitute(what))

DeepS> i.e., the check for is.character(what) is
DeepS> missing. This has the effect that 'what' can no
DeepS> longer be a character string generated by a function
DeepS> call unless 'character.only = TRUE'. I don't think
DeepS> this was intended; the change makes previously valid
DeepS> use invalid and I can't think of a situation where it
DeepS> is useful.

[ Did you read the corresponding NEWS entry? ]

It now parallelizes the use in library() , require() etc,
and in particular does what the documentation says it does!

The old behavior was much less consistent and not according to
documentation:

     apropos(lm)    was equivalent to apropos("lm")
but  apropos(fit)   gave an error.

I would actually prefer if we only had standard evaluation for apropos()
and find().

(I understand we cannot do this for library() and help().)

-k