[Bioc-devel] Environment/RSqlite db interaction

[Seth Falcon]

"Laurent Gautier" <lgautier at gmail.com> writes:

> 2007/9/13, Seth Falcon <sfalcon at fhcrc.org>:
>> Hi Jim,
>>
>> Martin Morgan <mtmorgan at fhcrc.org> writes:
>> > John --
>>
>> John?  Is that the original poster with drug problems?
>>
>> >
>> > It's inherited from further up the search path
>> >
>> >> library("hgu95av2.db")
>> >> library("hgu95av2")
>> >> exists("db_conn", as.environment("package:hgu95av2"))
>> > [1] TRUE
>> >> exists("db_conn", as.environment("package:hgu95av2"), inherits=FALSE)
>> > [1] FALSE
>>
>> Yes that is exactly the problem.  I've committed a quick fix to
>> annaffy so that inherits=FALSE is used.  This helper function should
>> move to AnnotationDbi so there is one place that has a
>> are-you-a-db-package helper function.
>>
>> > This is probably a general issue when multiple packages with
>> > near-identical variables can be loaded.
>>
>> Well, only sort of.  The real issue was my goof in not using exists
>> properly.
>>
>> > I think seth will chime in with the future of db_conn, relating to
>> > issues like this.
>>
>> Here I go:
>>
>> Dispite it being possible, it really is a bad idea for all annotation
>> data packages to export the same symbols.  We will be changing these:
>> db_conn and db_file prior to the release and replace them with
>> accessor functions prefixed with the package name: hgu95av2_dbcon()
>> (name subject to change until implemented).
>
> Several packages exporting the same symbol has already bitten us.
> Couldn't namespaces be used here, with something like
> hgu95av2:::dbcon() instead ?

Yes, but this isn't a great solution because people that _did_ want to
use dbcon would have to use ':::' and IMO that should not be
encouraged -- things that are not exported should not be part of the
public interface.

> That would allow to have identical code within these annotation packages
> (since these packages are generated programatically, code duplication
> is presumably acceptable).

We will change the name to have a package prefix (like just about
every other object in these packages) very soon.

+ seth

-- 
Seth Falcon | Computational Biology | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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