Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Swinton, Jonathan wrote:

From: Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Rd] package 'stats' needs import directive for 1.9.0?
To: "Heywood, Giles" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


...

I suggest you don't try: there are already quite a few 1.9.0-specific versions of packages on CRAN, and 1.8.x will be history in a couple of months.



I'm not sure I understand the advice here. I have also hit the same problem,
and it seems reasonable to me to aspire to maintain a single package which
works on both 1.8.x and 1.9.x.



It is not easily possible if namespaces are involved. We failed to anticpate that we would need version-dependent namespaces until rather late and then decided not to set up an elaborate solution when most people affected had already made separate versions for 1.9.0.


I'm confused (not for the first time). I can see that namespaces are an additional problem, but I thought the original question was about defining an S4 generic "start." This would conflict (and override?) the S3 generic in base, which I don't think is allowed in 1.9.0. Until recently I have been overriding the start function in base (and some others) with my own S3 generic, and have just gone through a rather lengthy exercise to rename these functions and some objects and other methods so that things do work in 1.9.0. (They do also work in 1.8.1.)

Will S3 and S4 generics for start co-exist? What happens to all the S3 methods for start if the S4 generic is loaded? Won't this break a lot of code other than mine?

Paul Gilbert

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