[Rd] changes in recent R-devel revisions?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, Martin Morgan wrote:

> On 03/01/2011 03:19 PM, Benilton Carvalho wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a BioC infra-structure package that works fine (I can build,
>> check and load it successfully) on revision r53950. The very same
>> package fails on r54591 with the error below:
>>
>> Error in loadNamespace(package, c(which.lib.loc, lib.loc), keep.source
>> = keep.source) :
>>   cyclic name space dependency detected when loading ‘oligoClasses’,
>> already loading ‘oligoClasses’
>>
>> I don't see anything obvious in the name space that would indicate
>> cyclic dependency and I wonder:

The message is slightly misleading, which is why I added the 
additional information (in r54520, so this came in a litte before 
that) about what is being loaded.  'oligoClasses' is loading itself 
(which would be seen as a cycle on a graph).  I first saw it on a CRAN 
package which was loading oligoClasses via several other packages and 
it was not at all clear which namespaces were involved.

> For what it's worth, saying
>
>> trace(stop, recover)
>
> prior to library(oligoClasses) leads to
>
> 7: loadNamespace(package, c(which.lib.loc, lib.loc), keep.source =
> keep.source
> 8: methods:::cacheMetaData(ns, TRUE, ns)
> 9: getGeneric(f, FALSE, searchWhere, fpkg)
> 10: tryCatch(loadNamespace(package), error = function(e) e)
>
> where 'package' is oligoClasses in lines 7 and 10, and the 'f' in 9 is
> 'relocateObject'. Line 10 is evaluated when methods:::.getGeneric
> returns NULL.
>
> In oligoClasses we have
>
> oligoClasses/R> grep relocateObject *
> AllGenerics.R:setGeneric("relocateObject", function(object, ...)
> standardGeneric("relocateObject"))
> methods-CNSet.R:relocateObject <- function(object, to){
>
> which I guess is not as intended.
>
> My guess is that setGeneric adds the generic to a cache of some sort
> when the name space is created, but doesn't remove it when the generic
> is overwritten by a plain function.
>
> No idea why this shows up in the current R revision.

r54487 has caused some other changes in behaviour: I think the 
oligoClasses problem appeared about that time.


>
> Martin
>
>>
>> a) if there were changes that were meant to affect this;
>>
>> b) what is the recommended strategy to solve this issue.
>>
>> Thank you very much for any suggestion,
>>
>> benilton
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>
> -- 
> Computational Biology
> Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
> 1100 Fairview Ave. N. PO Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109
>
> Location: M1-B861
> Telephone: 206 667-2793
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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