On 29/04/2015 1:57 PM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbec...@ucdavis.edu>
wrote:
> Gabor,
>
> To play devil's advocate a bit, why not just have the package formally
> import the functions it wants to use (or the whole package if that is
> easier)?
>
This is exactly my goal. And to facilitate this, R CMD check could remind
you if you forgot to do the formal import.
You don't want to require people to import things like the assignment
> operator, or "if", or a bunch of other things in the base package (and
> probably not the stuff in grDevices either, though from your description
> they would in principle need to do that now).
>
I am not talking about the 'base' package, only the other base packages.
(The base package is special, it is searched before the attached packages,
so it is probably fine.)
Yes, I suggest people import stuff from grDevices explicitly. Because if
they don't, their package might break if used together with other packages.
And this is not a theoretical issue, in the past couple of weeks I have
seen this happening three times.
But why should stats not require an import if you want to guarantee that
> you get the density function from stats and not from somewhere else? Isn't
> that what ImportFrom is for? Is the reason that it is loaded automatically?
>
That's exactly what I am saying, sorry if it was not clear. I want to
"require" format imports from base packages (except from _the_ base
package, maybe).
Yes, people can do this already. But why not help them with a NOTE if they
don't know that this is good practice, or they just simply forget?
I suspect the reason for this is historical: at the time that the
current warning was added, it would have flagged too many packages as
problematic. People do complain when base R makes changes that force
them to change their packages. Perhaps that decision should be
reconsidered now.
Duncan Murdoch
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