[R] problem with an old .RData file

[Prof Brian Ripley]

When you load your old workspace, try

conflicts(detail = TRUE)

The workspace contains a lazyload promise from that very old version, 
with the name of a system function.  You need to delete that promise 
from the workspace, and the command above should help you find which 
it is.

One guess is 'file', in which case use 'rm(file)' .

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, Marco Barbàra wrote:

> Dear useRs,
>
> Today I've encountered a weird unexpected behaviour. It is not a real
> problem for me and I can workaround it. But I'm very curious of what
> could have caused it.
>
> Starting an R session in a directory with an old .RData my first command
> was
>
>> library(MASS)
>
> and i got
>
> Errore in .Call("R_lazyLoadDBfetch", key, file, compressed, hook,
> PACKAGE = "base") : C symbol name "R_lazyLoadDBfetch" not in DLL for
> package "base"
>
> In this session the same error appear when I try a save.image() or
> simply answer "yes" when closing R (I can close only answering
> "no"). But I manage to view and work with the saved environment.
>
> The problem is strictly connected with *this* .RData file and
> other .RData files saved in the same period with the same version of R
> (2.1.1) work correctly.
>
> Now, the question. I'd like to look inside this file to search for
> differences with working ones, but from within R I cannot save an ascii
> version of this file due to this problem, and i do not know what kind
> of compression was applied (gunzip says «not in gzip format»).

It is gzip format.  But looking inside the file will not help you, 
even whn you know the 'R Internals' manual backwards: the format is 
simply not human-readable.

> Is there a way of inspecting this file?
> thank you all for reading till now...
>
>
> --
>  Marco Barbàra
>
> - Undergraduate student in Statistics
>  at the University of Palermo (Italy)
>
> - Only free (as in freedom) software user
>
> - Emacs lover
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
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