[Rd] Recent and upcoming changes to R-devel

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed I find this change to be a very welcome addition to R that will
make the life easier for many of us; especially when you are using
someone else's package.

My use case is also not debugging my own code when it is a at a
semi-mature level.  I am addressing the very early stages of
developing a new package.  In my workflow (which may differ from other
people's; but I do think a substantial number would agree with me),
the early stages of development usually entails bringing order to a
number of R scripts; figuring out the structure of the basic objects
as well as the arguments for the important functions/methods.  In this
early stage, almost any evaluation I do at the R prompt is followed by
refactoring some part of the code (and then sourcing it into R).

Once the code is semi-matured (after the first couple of weeks), I
don't think I would mind a NAMESPACE at all, but I believe I would
find it very frustrating during the very early development stage
(which I am going through right now for one package and which I went
through a month ago for another package).

Kasper