I may have misunderstood, but: Please could we have an optional installation that does not *not* byte-compile base and recommended?
Reason: it's not possible to debug byte-compiled code-- at least not with the 'debug' package, which is quite widely used. I quite often end up using 'mtrace' on functions in base/recommended packages to figure out what they are doing. And sometimes I (and others) experiment with changing functions in base/recommended to improve functionality. That seems to be harder with BC versions, and might even be impossible, as best I can tell from hints in the documentation of 'compile'). Personally, if I had to choose only one, I'd rather live with the speed penalty from not byte-compiling. But of course, if both are available, I could install both. Thanks Mark -- Mark Bravington CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences Marine Laboratory Castray Esplanade Hobart 7001 TAS ph (+61) 3 6232 5118 fax (+61) 3 6232 5012 mob (+61) 438 315 623 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. > 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). ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
