[Bioc-devel] [biocore] Sweave changes (keep.source = TRUE or FALSE?)

Friedrich Leisch friedrich.leisch at stat.uni-muenchen.de
Wed Dec 6 11:41:43 CET 2006


[ resent to bioc-devel upon request from Seth ]

>>>>> On Tue, 5 Dec 2006 13:17:14 -0500 (EST),
>>>>> Vincent Carey 525-2265 (VC5) wrote:

  >> 
  >> Sorry to join in late, I was travelling last week. First, let me thank
  >> Duncan for his work, this really fixes one of the main drawbacks
  >> Sweave had!
  >> 
  >> Hence, I agree with Duncan and Martin in that I would like to change
  >> the default in R to keep.source=TRUE. But I understand Robert that
  >> testing software gets hard if the tools which are used for testing
  >> change.

  > It seems to me that if you are changing the API/behavior then we users have
  > to adapt to that, given sufficient warning.  This means that instead of
  > Sweave("foo.Rnw"), I have to write Sweave("foo.Rnw", keep.source=FALSE),
  > to get the former behavior, right?

Or insert \SweaveOpts{keep.source=FALSE} in the vignette or set the
global default for R via options() or whatever -> that is yet to be
implemented and one of the goals of this discussion is to see what is
the best way in terms of least work for developers.

  > It may still be debatable whether keep.source=TRUE is a desirable default.
  > It does propagate comments, but Sweave is supporting literate programming,
  > so that comments in code are not necessarily crucial for the objective
  > of the Sweave user.  The document narrative is supposed to take care
  > of commenting.  It is also not clear to me that keeping the source
  > formatting is preferable to the programmatic formatting by the interpreter
  > display facility.

  > So I would say there are real questions about the suitability of
  > keep.source=TRUE as a default for Sweave.  The availability is
  > definitely nice, but the spirit and aesthetic aspects of Sweave
  > use may be better supported in many cases, perhaps the vast
  > majority of all documents created to date, with keep.source=FALSE.

I agree on the comments part, i.e., that comments in code chunks
should not be so much necessary as in standard R code. One exception
is inside function definitions where the can be very usefull.

Ad source formatting: If you use a smart editor with automatic
indentation etc then human formatting is better than what the machine
does in many cases (depends on the human, of course). I tend to break
lines at points where it makes sense content-wise to group arguments
of a function on one line that belong together. E.g., for a plot
statment one line contains the data, the next line all axis
annotation, etc.


  >> 
  >> As discussed by email this summer on r-devel I want to change another
  >> Sweave default for 2.5: I want to set stylepath=FALSE and include no
  >> \usepackage{/path/to/Sweave.sty} by default. This means in effect that
  >> each Sweave file needs to be adapted, by either inserting
  >> \usepackage{Sweave} or \SweaveOpts{stylepath=true} in the header. I
  >> didn't implement the changes back then because the discussion was too
  >> close to feature freeze.
  >> 
  >> I also will do some other Sweave changes over christmas break, but
  >> those should all be safe, i.e., only add functionality.
  >> 
  >> Before people now start yelling at me: We can only improve software,
  >> if we are allowed to change it and/or fix behavior that can be
  >> considered a bug. And the paths inserted on Windows machines in an
  >> English locale are buggy (and were so ever since ...).

  > In the past windows users had to do something to deal with undesirable
  > latex resource path generation with Sweave, I have some recollection
  > of that.  Now all users have to do something to get the old
  > behavior?

No. I will implement an options setting for Sweave, i.e., you define
what you want once in your .Rprofile and are done. 


  > Is it not possible to fix the windows path generation problem at
  > the R level instead?

It is not an R problem, but a latex problem: The default path to an R
installation on an *English* windows machine (path depends on
language) is

  C:\Program Files\R\... 

and the blank is something latex cannot handle.

Best,
Fritz



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