How to change names when importing with a NAMESPACE (was: NAMESPACE Q: does import as exist?)

This is indeed described in

http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/namespaces/morenames.html

linked from developer.r-project.org.

with the comment

   The purpose of baz is to import some of the exports of foo and bar and
   re-export them, using renaming in one case: bar's export g is imported
   under the internal name hh, and the internal variable hh is exported
   under the name gg. [Renaming seems like a useful option, but it may
   turn out to create too many complications and need to be dropped.]

It's been there since 1.7.0 and not yet been dropped.  (I would also 
suggest checking the R-News article on namespaces, which I have not done.
But checking the developer site is always worthwhile.)

It would be nice to have more end-user documentation on namespaces, and I 
have suggested it in the past.  A project for you, perhaps?

Well, it seems that the following does what I want.  In the NAMESPACE
file, one can do:

 importFrom("pkgA", foo=bar)

Which will allow you to use the symbol 'foo' to refer to pkgA::bar.
This is exactly what I wanted.

Despite the lack of documentation, this seems an intentional feature.
Is there a reason not to document it and allow it as part of the
NAMESPACE feature set?

Best,

+ seth

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595