I agree that `message()` is in an ideally preferred, precisely because of the reasons Martin stated, it is easily controlled by the user.
Unfortunately, in the real world, the windows R gui console and RStudio (which copied behavior) color messages, and anything on stderr in fact, in red, which confuses most users who are trained to treat messages in red as errors. This also makes using colored output (where available) more challenging when using `message()`. You either have to accept the text as red, or unconditionally change the text color to black or similar, which can then be unreadable if the user is using a dark color theme. Jenny is an experienced package developer. She knew this tradeoff and the use of `cat()` in gargle was deliberate choice in an imperfect world. She did not make this decision out of ignorance of a better way. However there is no way for Jenny or any other package developers to have a dialog during a CRAN submission, the communication is only in one direction, if she resubmits explaining her rationale for the choice she may not even have the same reviewer the next time. Bioconductor seems to have a much better review process for submissions, with real dialog between the reviewer and package author, perhaps CRAN can learn from that process and improve the submission experience in the future. Jim On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 7:41 AM Martin Morgan <mtmorgan.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > > message() / warning() / stop() write to stderr whereas print() / cat() write > (by default) to stdout. Even without being able to suppress messages, it is > well-established practice (the story is that this is the reason why 'stderr' > was introduced into unix, > https://www.jstorimer.com/blogs/workingwithcode/7766119-when-to-use-stderr-instead-of-stdout > ) to separate diagnostic messages from program output. I agree that gargle > (in particular, and packages in general, given the theme of this mailing > list) would be a better package if it used message() where it now uses cat(). > > Martin > > On 5/15/19, 5:04 AM, "R-package-devel on behalf of Joris Meys" > <r-package-devel-boun...@r-project.org on behalf of joris.m...@ugent.be> > wrote: > > 2) Where cat() is used in gargle, message() is a better option for the > following reason: > > > myfun <- function(){cat("Yes");message("No")} > > suppressMessages(myfun()) > Yes > > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
