[R-pkg-devel] loadMethod() not available with Rscript

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 20 September 2017 at 16:44, Martyn Plummer wrote:
| On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 09:45 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > Thierry,
| > 
| > This has always been a considerable puzzle, and the source of some amusement,
| > to me.  It is a clear design bug in Rscript because _code that would
| > otherwise work_ will not if it happens to rely on library(methods). S4 comes
| > to mind.  This has also been answered at least a few times on SO.
| > 
| > Now, 'r' from littler always did this differently and lods methods, just like
| > R itself does.  And 'r' still starts (way) faster as I once documented in a
| > blog post.
| > 
| > If someone from R Core reads this and nods silently: please put this to rest
| > and make sure Rscript also loads the methods package.
| 
| We have been here before, most recently in 2016
| 
| https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16921
| 
| There are opinions on both sides, of course, but the decision rests in
| the hands of those who use extensively for its original purpose (i.e.
| running short snippets of R code) and for whom the overhead from
| loading the methods package is still unacceptable, despite being
| substantially reduced since this decision was made 10 years ago.

Sure, I don't care. I wrote littler for my purposes.

But to be honet I still find it strange that you all troll your users by
withholding one (base) package on one platform only, but your call.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org