[R-sig-Geo] problem assigning POSIX class to AttributeList column
Martin Maechler
maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
Fri Aug 25 17:19:32 CEST 2006
>>>>> "Edzer" == Edzer J Pebesma <e.pebesma at geo.uu.nl>
>>>>> on Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:54:11 +0200 writes:
Edzer> Mike, in reaction to
Edzer> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2006-July/001189.html
Edzer> on http://www.geog.uu.nl/~pebesma/sp_0.9-0.tar.gz I
Edzer> prepared an sp version where the data slot for
Edzer> storing attribute data of classes
Edzer> SpatialPointsDataFrame, SpatialGridDataFrame and
Edzer> SpatialPixelsDataFrame is (again) a genuine
Edzer> data.frame (this used to the the AttributeList).
Edzer> There's little point in further developing the
Edzer> AttributeList class as the problems we had with the
Edzer> data.frame class -- excessive memory, disk and CPU
Edzer> usage for creating huge character row.names vectors,
Edzer> see e.g. the little example in the R-News 5/2 --
Edzer> have been solved in R 2.4.0; see
Edzer> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-April/037306.html
Edzer> The upgrade to 2.4.0 seems to be binary incompatible
Edzer> for S4 objects,
well, 'yes' if "binary incompatible" means that S4 objects saved
in older versions of R are not quite what they are when you
recreate them in R devel (2.4.0 to be).
I.e. if they belong to your package and are saved as <pkg>/data/<foo>.rda
you'll want recreate them eventually
and then have your package depend on R 2.4.0 -- which is a bit
undesirable, unless you are willing to maintain too parallel
versions of your package, one for R <= 2.3.x, and another for
(current) R-devel and newer.
For the 'Matrix' package, we decided for the time being to use
./data/*.R scripts reading ./external/*.rda files which contain
the raw data and then recreate our S4 data objects at data load time.
This has the one advantage that it does not depend on R versions
and even still works if we slightly change class definitions.
Edzer> so that may be a good moment to make
Edzer> this binary incompatible change in sp (see
Edzer> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-August/038811.html). In
Edzer> general, we do recommend sp users to always keep the
Edzer> scripts that generate or manipulate their data.
Indeed! And that recommendation goes for all of using R, not
just "geo"-like use.
Edzer> You, or others, may want to use it, along with R
Edzer> 2.3.1 or 2.4.0 to solve your current problem.
Edzer> Best regards, -- Edzer
Edzer> _______________________________________________
Edzer> R-sig-Geo mailing list R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
Edzer> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
More information about the R-sig-Geo
mailing list