I found an issue with the data() command this evening when working on the
survival package.
1. I have a lot of data sets in the package, almost all used in at least one
vignette,
help file, or test. As a space saving measure, I have bundled many of them
together,
i.e., the file data/cancer.rda contains 19 data sets, many of them small. The
resulting
file (using xz compression) is quite a bit smaller than the individual ones.
(I still get
a warning note about size from R CMD check, but I'm no longer 2x the limit.)
2. Consider the lung data set. All of these fail:
data(lung)
data("lung")
data(lung, package="survival")
a. The lung.Rd file had \usage{data(lung)}; that error was not caught by R
CMD check.
(Several other .Rd files as well.)
b. In broader examples for teaching, I sometimes load data from other
packages, e.g
data(aidssi, package="mstate"). But this does not work for survival. (The
larger
survival data sets that are in separate .rda files can be found.)
c. What does work is survival::lung. Might it be useful to add a comment to
data.Rd to
this effect?
3. Creating a separate package 'survivaldata' is of course one route, and is
suggested in
the "Writing R Extensions" guide. But this is not possible since survival is a
recommended package: it can't load any non-recommended package for it's tests
or
vignettes. Longer term, perhaps there is way around this constraint?
Terry T.
--
Terry M Therneau, PhD
Department of Health Science Research
Mayo Clinic
[email protected]
"TERR-ree THUR-noh"
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