CRAN package fBasics

[Kurt Hornik]

Dear Rmetrics maintainer(s?),

As you will soon be able to see from the fBasics check results page, for
r-devel we now get

* checking foreign function calls ... WARNING
Foreign function call(s) with ‘PACKAGE’ argument in a base package:
.C("swilk", ..., PACKAGE = "stats")

and

* checking examples ... ERROR
Running examples in ‘fBasics-Ex.R’ failed
The error most likely occurred in:

> assign(".ptime", proc.time(), pos = "CheckExEnv")
> ### Name: NormalityTests
> ### Title: Normality Tests
> ### Aliases: NormalityTests normalTest ksnormTest shapiroTest
> ###   jarqueberaTest dagoTest jbTest adTest cvmTest lillieTest pchiTest
> ###   sfTest
> ### Keywords: htest
> 
> ### ** Examples
> 
> ## Series:
>    x = rnorm(100)
> 
> ## ksnormTests -
>    # Kolmogorov - Smirnov One-Sampel Test
>    ksnormTest(x)

Title:
 One-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test

Test Results:
  STATISTIC:
    D: 0.0947
  P VALUE:
    Alternative Two-Sided: 0.3317 
    Alternative      Less: 0.1666 
    Alternative   Greater: 0.8637 

Description:
 Sun Jul 29 17:29:30 2012 by user: hornik

> 
> ## shapiroTest - Shapiro-Wilk Test
>    shapiroTest(x)
Error in .C("swilk", init = FALSE, as.single(x), n, n1 = as.integer(n),  : 
  C symbol name "swilk" not in DLL for package "stats"
Calls: shapiroTest -> .shapiro.test -> .C
Execution halted

So obviously this needs fixing, but the underlying issue is quite
serious: you have yet again copied from R (test-normalityTest.R even
says

.shapiro.test <- 
function(x) 
{   
    # A copy from R:

etc.) despite the CRAN policy:

  'The ownership of copyright and intellectual property rights of all
   components of the package must be clear and unambiguous (including
   from the authors specification in the DESCRIPTION file). Where code
   is copied (or derived) from the work of others (including from R
   itself), care must be taken that any copyright statements are
   preserved and authorship is not misrepresented.'

In principle, packages with copyright and/or license violations need to
be taken down from CRAN, which would mean removing fBasics and at least
archiving all its dependencies.  In any case we will need to remove the
history of fBasics unless you can tell us which earlier versions do meet
the policies.

Unfortunately, this is not the first such issue arising for Rmetrics
packages.  Hence, can you pls not only address the issue at hand, but
also make sure that all Rmetrics packages really comply with CRAN's
policy?

Best
-k