[R] .First.lib doesn't appear to be running after calling library()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Crispin Miller wrote:

> Hi - so I've dusted off the C bits of my brain and gotten a library written for my package...
>  
> It passes R CMD check ok, and I've put a file called '.First.lib.R' in the pacakge's 'R'  subdirectory. Its permissions are 644.
> 
> It says:
> 
> .First.lib <- function(lib,pkg) {
>    library.dynam("foo",pkg,lib);
>    require(affy,quietly=TRUE);
> }
> 
> 
> I build and INSTALL the package, start R and then call library(foo).
> I deduce that my '.First.lib' isn't running because the affy library doesn't get loaded - and neither does my dynamic library (which complies ok and results in 'foo.so' being put in the 'src/' directory of the package)...
> 
> Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Don't use a file name starting with a dot.  Assuming this is Unix and R 
1.7.1, INSTALL does

    Rfiles=`LC_COLLATE=C ls R/*.[RSqrs] R/${R_OSTYPE}/*.[RSqrs] 2>/dev/null`

and ls will omit file names starting with a dot.

`Writing R Extensions' says

The @file{R} subdirectory contains @R{} code files.  The code files to
be installed must start with a (lower or upper case) letter and have one
of the extensions @file{.R}, @file{.S}, @file{.q}, @file{.r}, or
@file{.s}. 

but it seems we don't quite enforce that on either Unix nor Windows.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595