[R] Turning a source into a Package

[Jim Lemon]

On 08/10/2010 02:51 AM, JH wrote:
>
> I want to edit a function in the nlme package. I download the package source
> nlme_3.1-96.tar.gz from the link below then edit it one of the scripts
> inside of it. From this stage how can I turn it into a package that I can
> use in R?
>
> http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/nlme/index.html

Hi JH,
The problem I have encountered with this is that installed packages 
often do not have all the required directories and the source code for 
checking and building. With a small package, you can get the source code 
for all the functions by sinking the output produced by invoking each 
function name without arguments to a file in the R subdirectory (copy 
the whole installed package directory to another location first):

sink("anova.lme.R")
cat("anova.lme<-")
anova.lme
sink()

but this is only practical for small packages. You would also have to 
back translate the HTML help files to Rd format and place these in the 
man directory, again a considerable task for a package like nlme. Your 
best bet for something like this is to load the library:

library(nlme)

and then source the modified code:

source("anova.lme.R")

or whatever function you have modified. You can even write a function to 
do this:

my.library(x,newfile) {
  library(x)
  source(newfile)
}

my.library("nlme","anova.lme.R")

Jim