[Rd] R CMD check and missing imports from base packages

[John Nolan]

All,

Here are two ideas on this:

1. have R CMD check show how every external function reference gets 
resolved.
2. have R CMD check warn anytime there is a potential name conflict, e.g. 
density( ) coming from either igraph or stats, and show how it was 
resolved.

Either could be an option.  I guess there are potential problems with 
conditional loading of libraries where a function could be  resolved 
differently depending on some decision made at run time, but 1. or 2. 
might be useful for the standard case.

John 
 ..............................................................
 John P. Nolan
 Math/Stat Department
 227 Gray Hall,   American University
 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
 Washington, DC 20016-8050

 jpnolan at american.edu       voice: 202.885.3140 
 web: academic2.american.edu/~jpnolan
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From:   Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com>
To:     Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu>, 
Cc:     "r-devel at r-project.org" <r-devel at r-project.org>
Date:   04/29/2015 01:57 PM
Subject:        Re: [Rd] R CMD check and missing imports from base 
packages
Sent by:        "R-devel" <r-devel-bounces at r-project.org>



On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu>
wrote:

> Gabor,
>
> To play devil's advocate a bit,  why not just have the package formally
> import the functions it wants to use (or the whole package if that is
> easier)?
>

This is exactly my goal. And to facilitate this, R CMD check could remind
you if you forgot to do the formal import.

You don't want to require people to import things like the assignment
> operator, or "if", or a bunch of other things in the base package (and
> probably not the stuff in grDevices either, though from your description
> they would in principle need to do that now).
>

I am not talking about the 'base' package, only the other base packages.
(The base package is special, it is searched before the attached packages,
so it is probably fine.)

Yes, I suggest people import stuff from grDevices explicitly. Because if
they don't, their package might break if used together with other 
packages.
And this is not a theoretical issue, in the past couple of weeks I have
seen this happening three times.

But why should stats not require an import if you want to guarantee that
> you get the density function from stats and not from somewhere else? 
Isn't
> that what ImportFrom is for? Is the reason that it is loaded 
automatically?
>

That's exactly what I am saying, sorry if it was not clear. I want to
"require" format imports from base packages (except from _the_ base
package, maybe).

Yes, people can do this already. But why not help them with a NOTE if they
don't know that this is good practice, or they just simply forget?

Gabor


>
> Best,
> ~G
>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:00 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 12:53 PM, Winston Chang 
<winstonchang1 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 3:04 PM, Gábor Csárdi 
<csardi.gabor at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > E.g. if package 'ggplot2' uses 'stats::density()', and package
>> 'igraph'
>> > > also defines 'density()', and 'igraph' is on the search path, then
>> > > 'ggplot2' will call 'igraph::density()' instead of 
'stats::density()'.
>> >
>> >
>> > Just to be clear: you mean that this happens when ggplot2 contains a
>> > call like 'density()', not 'stats::density()' (but the intention is 
to
>> > call stats::density()), right?
>> >
>>
>> Yes, exactly as you say, I am sorry for the confusion. This is actually 
a
>> real example:
>> https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/issues/1041
>>
>> Gabor
>>
>>
>> >
>> > -Winston
>> >
>>
>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Gabriel Becker, PhD
> Computational Biologist
> Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
> Genentech, Inc.
>

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