My 2c is that if a package has actually tested something like that (say, the ordering of a list's elements), then it is 100% likely that a script out there depends on that behaviour too. In other words, the change is not inconsequential. R users are in debt to package developers but I think it behoves us to take special care not to underestimate the work involved when a package's behaviour changes.
On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 20:09, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm updating the rgl package, and have come across the following problem. > > Some packages that depend on rgl and do careful testing are detecting > inconsequential changes. A typical case is the nat package, which has > extensive testing, some of which comes down to checking results from rgl > functions using testthat::is_equal(). I rewrote some parts of the rgl > code, and so some rgl objects differ in irrelevant ways. For example, > > obj <- list(x = NULL) > > differs from > > obj <- list() > obj[["x"]] <- NULL > > (the first is length 1, the second ends up with no entries). All tests > in rgl would be like > > if (is.null(obj[["x"]])) ... > > so the tests evaluate the same, but testthat::is_equal() doesn't return > TRUE, because the objects are different. > > Another example would be > > obj <- list() > obj$a <- 1 > obj$b <- 2 > > which differs from > > obj <- list() > obj$b <- 2 > obj$a <- 1 > > in the order of the components, but since rgl always accessed them by > name, that makes no difference. > > So what I'm looking for is a strategy to hide internal implementation > details. (I'm using a compare_proxy() method now which standardizes the > objects, but that seems very specific to testthat version 3. I'd like > ideas for something more robust.) > > Duncan Murdoch > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
