[Rd] Recent and upcoming changes to R-devel

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-07-06 9:25 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Prof Brian Ripley<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:
>> In the near future all packages will have a name space.  If the sources do
>> not contain one, a default NAMESPACE file will be added. This again will
>> simplify the descriptions and also a lot of internal code.  Maintainers of
>> packages without name spaces (currently 42% of CRAN) are encouraged to add
>> one themselves.
>
> This is great.  However, it would also be great if a user could
> disable this for a given package at install time, for example with a
> command line argument to R CMD INSTALL.  Use case: in the early stages
> of package development I find it incredible useful to not have a
> NAMESPACE.  This is of course before I release it to anyone else;
> purely for development.
>
> My guess is that this has already been anticipated, but in case not, I
> wanted to raise the issue.

I think the idea is to completely remove support for the bad search 
order you get when you don't have a namespace.  That search order is a 
mixed blessing in debugging:  it makes it easy to replace functions with 
new versions, but it also makes it very easy to execute the wrong code 
if you happen to have something sitting in the global environment that 
has a conflicting name.

It seems like something a front end could do to make assignInNamespace 
easier to use to make working with namespaces easier.

Duncan Murdoch