[Rd] portableParalleSeeds Package violation, CRAN exception?

[William Dunlap]

You can make an environment called streamsEnv in your package by adding
   streamsEnv <- new.env()
to one of your R/*.R files. (its parent environment will be
namespace:yourPackage) and your functions can assign things to this
environment instead of to .GlobalEnv.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com


On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm writing to ask for a policy exception, or advice on how to make
> this package CRAN allowable.
>
> http://rweb.quant.ku.edu/kran/src/contrib/portableParallelSeeds_0.9.tar.gz
>
> Yesterday I tried to submit a package on CRAN and Dr Ripley pointed
> out that I had not understood the instructions about packages.  Here's
> the part where the R check gives a Note
>
> * checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
> Found the following assignments to the global environment:
> File ‘portableParallelSeeds/R/initPortableStreams.R’:
>    assign("currentStream", n, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("currentStates", curStates, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("currentStream", 1L, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("startStates", runSeeds, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("currentStates", runSeeds, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("currentStream", as.integer(currentStream), envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("startStates", runSeeds, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>    assign("currentStates", runSeeds, envir = .GlobalEnv)
>
> Altering the user's environment requires a special arrangement with
> CRAN. I believe this is justified, I'll sketch the reasons now. But,
> mostly, I'm at your mercy and if there is any way to make this
> possible, I would be very grateful.
>
> To control & replace random number streams, it really is necessary to
> alter the workspace. That's where the random generator state is
> stored.  It is acknowledged in Robert Gentleman' s Book, R Programming
> for Bionformatics "The decision to have these [random generator]
> functions manipulate a global variable, .Random.seed, is slightly
> unfortunate as it makes it somewhat more difficult to manage several
> different random number streams simultaneously” (Gentleman, 2009, p.
> 201).
>
> I have developed an understandable set of wrapper functions that handle this.
>
> Some of you may recall this project. I've asked about it here a couple
> of times. We allow separate streams of randoms for different purposes
> within a single R run. There is a framework to save 1000s of those
> sets in a file, so it can be used on a cluster or in a single
> workstation.  This is handy because, when 1 run in 10,000 on the
> cluster exhibits some weird behavior, we can easily re-initiate that
> interactively and see what's going on.
>
> I have a  vignette "pps" that explains. I dropped a copy of that here
> in case you don't want to get the package:
>
> http://pj.freefaculty.org/scraps/pps.pdf
>
> While working on that, I gained a considerably deeper understanding of
> random generators and seeds.  That is what this vignette is about
>
> http://pj.freefaculty.org/scraps/PRNG-basics.pdf
>
>
> We've been running simulations on our cluster with the
> portableParallelSeeds framework for 2 years, we've never had any
> trouble.  We are able to re-start runs, verify random number draws in
> separate streams.
>
> PJ
> --
> Paul E. Johnson
> Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
> University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
> http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu
>
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