how to organize a lot of R source files

Hi.
Hi Henrik,

Thanks for your suggestion. I created a directory with 10 R files and
tried the following and measured its time

system.time(sourceDirectory("~/fun", modifiedOnly = F))
system.time(sourceDirectory("~/fun", modifiedOnly = T))

But the second line seems to spend as much time as the first line, I
thought ? the second line would be faster since no modification is made.
Use modifiedOnly=TRUE the first time too, and you'll see it'll work
the 2nd time.  When you call it the first time, R consider it as
"modified" (since last time), because it has never seen the code
before (in that R session).  If you add some verbose output in your
scripts, you'll definitely see when the scripts get sourced.

I guess you could say it should the way you did it, but the way it is
currently designed/implemented is that it does not record the last
"source" time unless you use modifiedOnly=TRUE.  Next release will
also support what you did.
Also the first line reports a warning as follows
In readLines(con = fh) :
?incomplete final line found on "~/fun/util1.R"
I don't see such a warning when I use source.
Unrelated.  Nothing to worry about.  I've added readLines(con=fh,
warn=FALSE) for the next release to get rid of such warnings.

/Henrik
Maybe the two issues are related. Please advise.

thanks

Jeff

On Fri, January 8, 2010 7:56 pm, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
library("R.utils"); sourceDirectory("myRFiles/", modifiedOnly=TRUE);

See ?sourceDirectory (regardless what the Rd help say, any '...'
argument is passed to sourceTo()).

/Henrik

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Hao Cen <hcen at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

Hi,

I wonder what is a better way to organize a lot of R source files. I
have a lot of utility functions written and store them in several source
files (e.g util1.R, util2.R,..utilN.R). I also have a master file in
which the source command is used to load all the util.R files. When I
need to use the utility functions in a new project, I create a new R
file (e.g main.R) in which I "source" the master file.

The problem with this approach is that anytime a single utility
function is modified, I need to rerun the source command in main.R to
load the master file, which loads all the utility R files via a loop
over each file. Sometimes I have to wait for 10 seconds to get them all
loaded. Sometimes I forget to run the source command. Is there a way in
R to 1)
only reload the file changed (like a make utility) when I run source on
all utility files and/or even better 2) ?reload the changed utility
files, when I run a command that use one of those utility functions,
without the need for me to source those files.

Not sure if packaging solves this issue because the library command has
be used every time a utility function is modified and in addition the
package has to be rebuilt. I don't worry about sharing the source files
at this moment as I am the only user of those utility files.

This may be a common issue many R users face. I wonder how other R
users solve this issue.

thanks

Jeff

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how to organize a lot of R source files

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