[Rd] Problem with distributing data in package.

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 20/07/2013 12:01, Simon Knapp wrote:
> Hi Barry,
>
> Thanks for the response, your suggestion was going to be my 'work
> around'... perhaps I took the second paragraph of section 1.1.5 of
> R-exts.pdf the wrong way.
>
> I'd be interested in knowing why there is a difference between the
> data in a source package (.rda files) and windows binary package (.R
> files) if anyone can tell me.

We have little idea what you did.  Apparently you feel you are exempted 
from the request in the posting guide for a reproducible example.

At a wild guess, you did not understand the point of R CMD build 
--no-resave-data and did not want your data resaved as a .rda file (the 
documented default).  But there is no mention of running 'R CMD build' here.

>
> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Barry Rowlingson
> <b.rowlingson at lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Simon Knapp <sleepingwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi List,
>>>
>>> I am building a package for a client to help them create and perform
>>> analyses against netcdf files which contain 'a temporal stack' of
>>> grids.
>>>
>>> For my examples and test cases, I create an example dataset in code
>>> (as this is a lot more space efficient than providing raw data). The
>>> code creates a netcdf file in tempdir() and an object of class 'ncdf'
>>> in the global namespace. I have placed the code in a .R file in the
>>> data directory of my package and 'load' it with a call to data().
>>
>>   Why not just put the function that generates the data file into the
>> usual place (/R/ folder) and document it so that the user knows to run
>> 'sampledata=makeSampleNCDF()' before doing things that need it?
>>
>>   Trying to put executable code into the data folder does seem a bit perverse!

Actually, it seems to be *interpretable* R code in a .R file.

The help file for data() says:

Details:

      Currently, four formats of data files are supported:

        1. files ending ‘.R’ or ‘.r’ are ‘source()’d in, with the R
           working directory changed temporarily to the directory
           containing the respective file.  (‘data’ ensures that the
           ‘utils’ package is attached, in case it had been run _via_
           ‘utils::data’.)
...

and (in so far as we can tell without the requested example) that was 
the 'format' intended to be used.

>>
>> Barry


-- 
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)
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