[Rd] rdyncall fears removal from CRAN

[Daniel Adler]

Dear R Core and CRAN Team,

I received a warning that the rdyncall package [1] will be archived and removed from the main CRAN distribution at 7th of September
if I can not get rid of .Internal calls.

> From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
> Subject: Use of .Internal in CRAN package rdyncall
> Date: August 14, 2012 11:09:06 AM GMT+02:00
> To: dadler at uni-goettingen.de
> 
> R CMD check has been warning about the use of .Internal in packages
> for several months now, in R-release since 2.15.0.  We have decided
> that it will not be allowed at all in the next release of R (not least
> because the work on long vectors means we need to move
> argument-checking code between internal code and the R wrapper).
> 
> So can we please have a package update without .Internal calls by
> September 7 (or the package will be archived).  You should also check
> the R-devel CRAN check pages at
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_<pkg>.html (replace
> <pkg> by the name of your package) for any other issues that need to
> be addressed.


The use of .Internal in rdyncall was due to a missing interface for namespace object management.
Since the main task of this package is to offer an alternative FFI *AND* a catalog of ready-to-use bindings to
popular C libraries (across platforms) and interface for attach/remove of namespace objects was required.
The current implementation uses a small snippet of code "makeNamespace" from src/library/base/R/namespace.R and we have to make a 
call to .Internal(registerNamespace).

A request was made on the mailing list in the past:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-December/062839.html

Since the deadline is very soon, I emphasize and repeat my request for an R programming interface to namespace objects
and I please you for advices to go about this issue.

Are there any other plans for opening the interface to namespace management?

The namespace creation function 'makeNamespace' is currently defined in a local scope to another function 
making it not accessible from the outside.
'registerNamespace' is a functionality only available via '.Internal'.
So what is 'good pratice' for opening access to this - another wrapper in 'base' that calls '.Internal' ?

It would be very sad if rdyncall is dropped from CRAN since more and more package authors are using it for different applications.
For those that need more detail, there is an article on R Journal (http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2012-1/RJournal_2012-1_Adler.pdf)

Any help, comment and advice is very appreciated.

Thank you
- Daniel

Begin forwarded message:

> 
> 
> The CRAN team