Some extensions to class inheritance and method selection
Stavros Macrakis wrote:
These look like important improvements. As a relative newcomer to the R community, I'm not sure I understand what the procedures are for such changes. In particular, does the fact that the changes were committed to R-devel mean that the changes have already been reviewed and approved by R Core? Are R Core's discussions / deliberations archived somewhere? What is the role of the larger R community in reviewing and approving changes like this? How is documentation handled? Who is responsible for developing and maintaining a definitive reference manual (not just man pages) which includes all the cumulative changes and describes them comprehensively and in black-box way (not referring to history and implementation details)?
as another newcommer, i admit the procedures mentioned above are quite opaque to me, too. from my perspective, it seems like quite many, if not most, improvements (changes, at least) to r code are committed in an ad hoc fashion, by a single developer, without any publicly visible discussion. this is likely to lead, and in certain circumstances does lead, to bizarre, eclectic patches visible in the sources. it would be indeed interesting and desirable to make the process more open, at least for review, by users. or is r not *that* open? vQ