fBasics / fUtilities -- getCall() // Martin's summer absence

[Martin Maechler]

Dear Rmetrics co-maintainers,
{i.e. mainly  dear Diethelm and Yohan, right ?}

For the next (major) version of R 2.14.0, due in October,
I've introduced a  'getCall()' {S3} generic with a default
method, which is used in stats::update() {for model updating}.

Because of that, I've found that the CRAN versions of fExtremes and fGarch
now warn.. ===> I've wanted to "fix" this smartly,
namely, depending on if the package runs in
R version <= 2.13.x (where there's no getCall() in stats)
and R version >= 2.14.0, define it as a function or as a Method.

    (--> see another e-mail just to you two).

For that, I've looked in the R-forge versions of all Rmetrics
packages, and found that
*both*  packages

 	fUtilities  and	fBasics

define a getCall() function.. and I've wondered, when I saw that
the two packages have basically the same

    fBasics/R/utils-getS4.R
    fUtilities/R/getS4.R      

and I see more  fBasics/R/utils-*.R  source files.

Do I guess correctly, that
fUtilities is deprecated already now  (together with fCalendar and fSeries)?
(-- but then, why did you (Yohan) still add changes to fUtilities in
 February 2010?)

With respect to that:

  Is there somewhere written up ... hopefully as part of the
  R-forge sources, the current Rmetrics
  strategy of dependencies of packages,
  so I can read it and look it up ..
  (and also add to it the fact that we agreed on factoring out 
   'stabledist' from 'fBasics')
?

Thank you for feedback...

BTW: Note that I will spend the next 3 days in Vienna (with part of R core),
and then travel to Columbia and Ecuador ... for full three weeks ...
up to July 18,
for vacation (visiting, traveling)  where I won't work, and only
have quite intermittent and short internet connection, probably.

Best regards,
Martin