[Rd] R CMD check tells me 'no visible binding for globalvariable'

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2010, Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. wrote:

> 'Henrik' wrote:
>
> I think what people are also thinking about is that the policy for
> publishing a package on CRAN is that it have to pass R CMD check with
> no errors, warnings *or* notes.  So, in that sense notes are no
> different from warnings.

I think that policy is a figment of his imagination.  'NOTE' was 
introduced to allow tentative warnings: we for example note .Rd errors 
that we can correct and warn (so far) on those we cannot.

> ---------------------------------
>
> Getting rid of these notes would be very hard in the survival package.
> The population survival routines (survexp, pyears) that have to deal
> with dates try to be very accommodating wrt the date format the user
> chose, so have constructions like
>   if (user date looks like a chron object) {
>         calculation using chron functions
>         }
>   else if (is from the date package) {
>        use mdy.date }
>   else if (Date object)
>
> etc
>
>   Most of the functions inside the {} cause a warning note because of
> course the necessary packages for each case are not present when
> survival is built.  Since we deal with medical studies that span
> multiple years or even decades, I and others in my group benefit
> directly from this date handling: it was not added solely from a
> humanitarian impulse.
>
>  It's a minor nuisance, since I have to read through the messages after
> each build to see if something I actually do need to worry about turns
> up.  It has happened, in which case I'm thankful for the message.
> (Although it would be nice if there were a way to generate more context.
> Once one was for an undefined variable 'n', which was not easy to find
> using a text editor.)

We do load all the Depends and Suggests packages when doing the 
codetools checks, so I think that

Suggests: date, chron, timeDate

would solve this. It leaves

predict.coxph: no visible global function definition for ‘labels.lm’
predict.coxph: no visible global function definition for ‘Build.terms’
predict.survreg: no visible global function definition for ‘labels.lm’
predict.survreg: no visible global function definition for  ‘Build.terms’
survpenal.fit: no visible global function definition for ‘new.frame’
survpenal.fit: possible error in get("coxlist1", frame = rho): unused
   argument(s) (frame = rho)
survpenal.fit: possible error in get("coxlist2", frame = rho): unused
   argument(s) (frame = rho)
survreg.fit: no visible global function definition for ‘new.frame’

which are I think all from S-Plus specific code.

Brian Ripley


>
> Terry Therneau
>
>
>
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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595