tar of Pkgs A, B, C attached. Martin

On 12/15/2011 03:34 PM, Martin Morgan wrote:
In

 > R.version.string
[1] "R Under development (unstable) (2011-12-15 r57901)"

section 1.6.6 of 'Writing R Extensions' says

Note that exporting methods on a generic in the namespace will
also export the generic, and exporting a generic in the
namespace will also export its methods.

and

Note that importMethodsFrom will also import any generics defined in
the namespace on those methods

However, if PkgA promotes 'unique' to a generic and exports that

DESCRIPTION:
Imports: methods

R/f.R:
setGeneric("unique")

NAMESPACE:
export(unique)

and PkgB creates and exports a method on unique

DESCRIPTION
Imports: methods, PkgA

R/f.R:
setClass("B", representation(b="numeric"))
setMethod(unique, "B",
function(x, incomparables=FALSE, ...) unique(x@b))

NAMESPACE:
importFrom(PkgA, unique)
exportClasses(B)
exportMethods(unique)

and PkgC wants to import PkgB's classes and methods

DESCRIPTION
Imports: methods, PkgB

R/f.R
cunique <- function(x) unique(x)

NAMESPACE
importMethodsFrom(PkgB, unique)
export(cunique)

then

(a) the 'unique' generic is not available to the user of PkgB

 > library(PkgB)
 > unique(new("B", b=1:5))
Error in unique.default(new("B", b = 1:5)) :
unique() applies only to vectors

and (b) the generic has not been imported to PkgC's namespace

 > cunique(new("B", b=1:5))
Error in unique.default(b) : unique() applies only to vectors

A workaround is for PkgB to also export(unique), and for PkgC to also
importFrom(PkgA, unique), but is this the intention?

This is arising from Bioconductor efforts to place commonly promoted
functions and S3 classes into a single package, to avoid conflicts when
the same function is promoted independently by several packages.

Martin


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Computational Biology
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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Telephone: 206 667-2793

Attachment: PkgABC.tar
Description: Unix tar archive

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