On 07/04/2011 05:08 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
There was an R-core meeting the week before last, and various planned
changes will appear in R-devel over the next few weeks.
These are changes planned for R 2.14.0 scheduled for Oct 31. As we are
sick of people referring to R-devel as '2.14' or '2.14.0', that version
number will not be used until we reach 2.14.0 alpha. You will be able to
have a package depend on an svn version number when referring to R-devel
rather than using R (>= 2.14.0).
All packages are installed with lazy-loading (there were 72 CRAN
packages and 8 BioC packages which opted out). This means that the code
is always parsed at install time which inter alia simplifies the
descriptions. R 2.13.1 RC warns on installation about packages which ask
not to be lazy-loaded, and R-devel ignores such requests (with a warning).
In the near future all packages will have a name space. If the sources
do not contain one, a default NAMESPACE file will be added. This again
will simplify the descriptions and also a lot of internal code.
Maintainers of packages without name spaces (currently 42% of CRAN) are
encouraged to add one themselves.
R-devel is installed with the base and recommended packages
byte-compiled (the equivalent of 'make bytecode' in R 2.13.x, but done
less inefficiently). There is a new option
R CMD INSTALL --byte-compile
to byte-compile contributed packages, but that remains optional.
Anticipating the future, contributed package byte-compilation will have
large effects on CRAN and especially Bioconductor build systems. For
instance, a moderate-sized package like Biobase built without vignettes
installs in about 19s with byte compilation, 9s with, while a more
complicated package IRanges is 1m25s, vs. 29s.
For Bioconductor this will certainly require new hardware across all
supported platforms, and almost certainly significant effort to improve
build system efficiencies.
Martin
Byte-compilation is quite expensive (so you definitely want to do it at
install time, which requires lazy-loading), and relatively few packages
benefit appreciably from byte-compilation. A larger number of packages
benefit from byte-compilation of R itself: for example AER runs its
checks 10% faster. The byte-compiler technology is thanks to Luke Tierney.
There is support for figures in Rd files: currently with a first-pass
implementation (thanks to Duncan Murdoch).
--
Computational Biology
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N. PO Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109
Location: M1-B861
Telephone: 206 667-2793
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