[Rd] Policy/best practices on renaming functions in packages

[Jonathan Greenberg]

R-developers:

I'm beginning to work on a manuscript for a set of functions I
developed for a package I have on CRAN (spatial.tools), and I'd like
to rename a function in my package to give a better idea of what it
does prior to manuscript submission -- is there a "safe" way to do a
backwards-compatible rename of a function within a CRAN package (so
functions that rely on the original name aren't broken)?  Is it as
simple as:

new_name <- old_name <- function(yadda)
{

}

In general, I'd just leave it as is, but the old name of the function
was a reference to an existing function in another package that it no
longer has any resemblance to.

Thanks!

--j

--
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
607 South Mathews Avenue, MC 150
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
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