Hi Jim, While its true that it wouldn't be *particularly *hard^^ to adapt the base code to change this, there is certainly a non-zero amount of user/package code that relies on the well-defined package tarball naming scheme as well. I know because I've written some myself in switchr/GRAN* but I seriously doubt I'm the only one. I would imagine there's also quite a bit of more if you include DEVOPSy-style build/administration scripts and not just user R code.
To me, the benefit of this change seems a pretty minor "nice-to-have" when weighed against breaking even a moderate amount of existing code. ^^ making sure we found every place the tarball naming scheme/package name constraints are implicitly assumed in the R sources might well be less trivial than we think, though once found I agree the changes would likely be *relatively* straightforward. For example, I happen to know that in addition to the places Duncan pointed out, tools::update_PACKAGES relies heavily on code that extracts the name and version of a package from something that "looks like a package tarball" as an optimization mechanism, so that would need to be reworked. It seems likely (almost certain?) that write_PACKAGES also relies on matching the tarball-name patter when determining which packages are present, though I remember less details there because I didn't write most of it. Best, ~G On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 9:40 AM Kevin Wright <kw.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > Please, no. I'd also like to disallow uppercase letters in package names. > For instance, the cuteness of using a capital "R" in package names is > outweighed by the annoyance of trying to remember which packages use an > upper-case letter. > > On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 9:32 AM Jim Hester <james.f.hes...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Are there technical reasons that package names cannot be snake case? > > This seems to be enforced by `.standard_regexps()$valid_package_name` > > which currently returns > > > > "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:].]*[[:alnum:]]" > > > > Is there any technical reason this couldn't be altered to accept `_` > > as well, e.g. > > > > "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]._]*[[:alnum:]]" > > > > I realize that historically `_` has not always been valid in variable > > names, but this has now been acceptable for 15+ years (since R 1.9.0 I > > believe). Might we also allow underscores for package names? > > > > Jim > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > > > > -- > Kevin Wright > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
