[Rd] Detaching "ctest"

[Jonathan Rougier]

Hi Everyone,

We have just upgraded to R-1.2.1, and I note, in contrast to R-1.1.1, that
ctest is now loaded automatically.  The mechanism for this is to create a
.First function in base:

.First <- function() {
    require("ctest", quietly=TRUE)
}

Now I don't want ctest, but I find that simply putting

if (length(grep("ctest", search())))
  detach(package:ctest)

into my ".Rprofile" does not work, for the simple reason that .First is
invoked after .Rprofile.  I thought that one possible solution is to
remove .First from base, but when I tried this I got

> find(".First")
[1] "package:base"
> search()
[1] ".GlobalEnv"      "package:ctest"   "package:patches" "Autoloads"      
[5] "package:base"   
> remove(".First", pos=5)
Warning message: 
remove: variable ".First" was not found 
> remove(".First", inherits=TRUE)
Warning message: 
remove: variable ".First" was not found 

Is it not possible to remove things from "base"?  The alternative is to
mask the .First with a blank one in my .Rprofile, but this seems rather
inelegant.

So my questions are:

(1) Why has ctest been included among the start-up options, and why has
this mechanism of using the .First been used, rather than relying on
people putting the command require("ctest", quietly=TRUE) into the
.Rprofile?

(2) Is there an elegant way of me stopping ctest from being loaded, other
then editing the Rprofile in R-1.2.1/lib/R/library/base/R/?

Many thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan Rougier                       Science Laboratories
Department of Mathematical Sciences    South Road
University of Durham                   Durham DH1 3LE
tel: +44 (0)191 374 2361, fax: +44 (0)191 374 7388
http://www.maths.dur.ac.uk/stats/people/jcr/jcr.html

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