[Rd] Underscores in package names

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 08/08/2019 10:31 a.m., Jim Hester wrote:
> Are there technical reasons that package names cannot be snake case?
> This seems to be enforced by `.standard_regexps()$valid_package_name`
> which currently returns
> 
>     "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:].]*[[:alnum:]]"
> 
> Is there any technical reason this couldn't be altered to accept `_`
> as well, e.g.
> 
>    "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]._]*[[:alnum:]]"
> 
> I realize that historically `_` has not always been valid in variable
> names, but this has now been acceptable for 15+ years (since R 1.9.0 I
> believe). Might we also allow underscores for package names?

The tarball names separate the package name from the version number 
using an underscore.  There is code that is written to assume there is 
at most one underscore, e.g. .check_package_CRAN_incoming in 
src/library/tools/R/QC.r.

That code could be changed, but so could the proposed package name...

Duncan Murdoch