On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 9:42 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 11-07-06 9:25 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen wrote: >> >> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Prof Brian Ripley<rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk> >> wrote: >>> >>> In the near future all packages will have a name space. If the sources >>> do >>> not contain one, a default NAMESPACE file will be added. This again will >>> simplify the descriptions and also a lot of internal code. Maintainers >>> of >>> packages without name spaces (currently 42% of CRAN) are encouraged to >>> add >>> one themselves. >> >> This is great. However, it would also be great if a user could >> disable this for a given package at install time, for example with a >> command line argument to R CMD INSTALL. Use case: in the early stages >> of package development I find it incredible useful to not have a >> NAMESPACE. This is of course before I release it to anyone else; >> purely for development. >> >> My guess is that this has already been anticipated, but in case not, I >> wanted to raise the issue. > > I think the idea is to completely remove support for the bad search order > you get when you don't have a namespace. That search order is a mixed > blessing in debugging: it makes it easy to replace functions with new > versions, but it also makes it very easy to execute the wrong code if you > happen to have something sitting in the global environment that has a > conflicting name. > > It seems like something a front end could do to make assignInNamespace > easier to use to make working with namespaces easier.
Indeed I find this change to be a very welcome addition to R that will make the life easier for many of us; especially when you are using someone else's package. My use case is also not debugging my own code when it is a at a semi-mature level. I am addressing the very early stages of developing a new package. In my workflow (which may differ from other people's; but I do think a substantial number would agree with me), the early stages of development usually entails bringing order to a number of R scripts; figuring out the structure of the basic objects as well as the arguments for the important functions/methods. In this early stage, almost any evaluation I do at the R prompt is followed by refactoring some part of the code (and then sourcing it into R). Once the code is semi-matured (after the first couple of weeks), I don't think I would mind a NAMESPACE at all, but I believe I would find it very frustrating during the very early development stage (which I am going through right now for one package and which I went through a month ago for another package). Kasper ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
