[Rd] Rscript fails with some packages (for example, h5)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 26 December 2017 at 15:24, Sun Yijiang wrote:
| After looking into C source code, I found that Rscript by default fills
| environment variable R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES with
| "datasets,utils,grDevices,graphics,stats", and it somehow fails some
| package like h5.
| 
| The problem here is, not setting R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES is equivalent to
| setting it to a magic value, it's really confusing.  I suggest remove this
| feature.

The more confusing part is that "methods" is missing 'by design' (as loading
methods is marginally more expensive that other packages). Ie for your script

   edd at bud:/tmp$ cat h5ex.R
   library(methods) 
   library(h5)
   name <- tempfile()
   f <- h5file(name)
   file.remove(name)
   edd at bud:/tmp$ Rscript h5ex.R
   [1] TRUE
   edd at bud:/tmp$

it all works if you just add `library(methods)` as seen in the first line.

For what it is worth, littler's r does not need that as it loads methods just
like R itself does avoiding the confusion:

   edd at bud:/tmp$ cat h5ex2.R
   library(h5)
   name <- tempfile()
   f <- h5file(name)
   file.remove(name)
   edd at bud:/tmp$ r h5ex2.R
   edd at bud:/tmp$

Dirk

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