On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbec...@ucdavis.edu>wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> To avoid the NOTEs (which often triggers a 'pls fix' upon submission to > >> CRAN), I simply copied/pasted these functions to my package, but this > seems > >> wasteful. > > >Wasteful of disk space, but disk space is cheap. It's less wasteful of > >your time, if the referenced code breaks in an unexpected time. Your > >time is much more valuable than disk space. > > On the other hand, it's quite dangerous software design. What if the > original author finds a bug and implements a fix, but you don't hear about > it? > > Furthermore, what happens when I come along and need the same > functionality? Sure I could make a copy, but maybe I only know about your > copy and don't know it is a copy of something else, so now we have a copy > of a copy, which is even more problematic. Using ::: prevents this issue. > Using ::: on a package you don't control can be more dangerous. For a package author to choose to export a function to the public interface represents at least some assurance that that interface will be stable or slow-moving. But there are no implied assurances about how code in the private namespace might change behind the scenes. I might completely refactor the code and change the behavior of any private function between 0.0.1 releases, but I would not do that for exported functions. Peter [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel