On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Konrad Rudolph < konrad.rudolph+r-de...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > So this is my question: what do other people think? Which is the most > useful and least confusing alternative from the usersâ perspective? > The most useful is alternative is "write packages". The overhead is minimal (install devtools, create("foo"); repeat { load_all("foo") ; edit; until_bugs==0} ). Reloading a package is a one-liner, you can't get more minimal. And with that you get a structure for documentation, a metadata standard, a wide range of sanity checks, and the option to push to CRAN or github for distribution. What you don't get is hierarchies. Can we get a hierarchy into base packages? That's the real question, and if answered I think it makes your module package redundant. I'd love to see a hierarchy with a colon-separator or something, so if I have a package with foo/R/thing.R and foo/R/this/thing.R I can do: require(foo) thing() this:thing() or similar.... I do like your approach of returning an object that provides an access to the functions without side-effects, but the masses are so brainwashed into thinking that require(foo) can put an unknown number of unknown-named functions into your search list that I don't think it will ever get into base R... Note I did once write a simple file loader to avoid using source - it used sys.source to load files into an environment on the search path, storing the folder name so that it could be easily reloaded, but then devtools came along... If you want your module package to succeed you are going to have to duplicate all the good stuff in packages - documentation, metadata, distribution (trivial: zip/unzip/pull/push), and then another problem - people will grow out of it - they'll start writing C and Fortran code. Going to support that? devtools already does. Barry [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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