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Best way to implement optional functions?

4 messages · Richard Cotton, Duncan Murdoch, Thierry Onkelinx

Richard Cotton
#
On 22 October 2015 at 22:55, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
I had the same issue with the assertive package: it was getting big,
and not everyone wanted all the functionality.

The solution was to create several smaller packages with individual
components of functionality, for example assertive.base contains the
bare-minimum functionality; assertive.numbers contains functionality
related to numbers, etc.

Then the assertive package imports all the functions from the
component packages and reexports them.

That way people who want a small footprint (mostly other package
developers) can specify only what they need, and people who don't care
(mostly end users) can just type library(assertive) and get access to
everything.
Duncan Murdoch
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On 16/11/2015 4:00 AM, Richard Cotton wrote:
When you import and re-export functions, do they need to be documented 
in both places?  I forget if we have a simple way to say "this function 
is documented in that package", to avoid duplication.

Duncan Murdoch
Thierry Onkelinx
# 
Roxygen2 documents imported and re-exported functions. See
http://www.r-bloggers.com/roxygen2-5-0-0/

Best regards,

ir. Thierry Onkelinx
Instituut voor natuur- en bosonderzoek / Research Institute for Nature and
Forest
team Biometrie & Kwaliteitszorg / team Biometrics & Quality Assurance
Kliniekstraat 25
1070 Anderlecht
Belgium

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more
than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say
what the experiment died of. ~ Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
The plural of anecdote is not data. ~ Roger Brinner
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not
ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
~ John Tukey

2015-11-16 22:02 GMT+01:00 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>:

  
  


  


      

    

    
6 days later

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Richard Cotton
    

    

      
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Yes, you do need at least a token about of documentation in both
packages.  I keep full documentation in the package where they
originate, and minimal documentation in the rexporting package.  The
roxygen code in the reexporting package looks like this:

#' Some function
#'
#' See \code{\link[originating_pkg]{some_function}}.
#' @name some_function
#' @export
NULL

I borrowed this idea from dplyr's reexporting of magrittr's pipe.

        
On 17 November 2015 at 00:02, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: