[R] Follow-up: pos= in library and require

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Sat, 13 Apr 2002, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

> Unfortunately I found that adding pos= in the attach( ) inside library( ) results in a corruption of the search list.  Packages will be attached in the desired position but the system then can't find any objects in that position.  I would really appreciate R correctly implementing pos= in library( ) and require( ).

As you know (I hope) R 1.5.0 is currently in feature freeze.
We've had a request to do this before, and we will look into it for 1.6.x.

One issue that occurred to me was what one should do about calls to
library() or require() from the .First.lib (or on loading the code) of a
package if a pos argument is allowed.  Are the dependent packages supposed
to displace the first package or not?  What if the dependent packages are
themselves given a pos= argument (as I think you wanted)?

I prefer to do tricky things early in the release cycle, to allow plenty
of experience with them.  Time has shown that few changes are
transparently simple.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._