two almost identical packages: best practice
On 9 Sep 2005, r.hankin at noc.soton.ac.uk wrote:
I have written a whole bunch of methods for objects of class "octonion". So far I've done about a dozen generic functions such as seq.octonion(), rep.octonion(), [<-.octonion(), and so on and so on. Very nearly all of these functions are applicable to objects of class "quaternion".
One solution would be to define a common base class (perhaps nionBase? ;-) and put the common methods there. So in S3 I guess you'd have an Im.nionBase function and your octonions and quaternions would be subclasses of nionBase.
(x))" but would be otherwise identical. A similar story holds for each of maybe twenty generic functions. Nearly all the Rd files are similarly identical: the word "octonion" replaces the word "octonion". I suppose "A" changes to "An" as well.
If you document the generics for the base class, I think that would work. Otherwise, find/replace.
There is a small number of functions and datasets that are specific to octonions. What is Best Practice in this situation? I don't want to edit two separate packages in tandem. Is there a mechanism for doing what I want in the context of a bundle?
If they need to be in separate packages, perhaps you have three packages: nionBase quaternion (depends on nionBase) etc. HTH, + seth