On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 09:33:10 -0500, you wrote: >I also share your views about namespaces. These have caused numerous >problems for me. It would be nice to have more of a mechanism to put >"feelers" out to the R user community when major changes are planned.
Changes always show up in r-devel (the main CVS branch, not the mailing list) first. Package developers should be keeping a relatively up to date copy of it around if they're doing things that are likely to break. >In Hmisc and Design I reference several functions that were not exported >from packages that now use namespaces. There is an elegant solution with >the package:::function notation, I'd recommend avoiding that as much as you can. If things aren't exported from a package, then the package writer is likely to feel free to change them without warning. It's much better to convince the package writer that they missed something in their export list. >but I have been unable to use this >solution because I use one code base for all versions of R and S-Plus. >This notation generates syntax errors in all but late versions of R. I think it's reasonable to restrict the availability of updates to your packages to the currently released R version. There are reasons why people might not be up to date (e.g. only doing upgrades at a specific time of year), but they'll still have access via CRAN to older versions of your package. Compatibility with S-PLUS is a lot harder, of course. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
