mvbutils-package {mvbutils}R Documentation

How to use the mvbutils package

Description

Package mvbutils is a collection of utilities offering the following main features:

There are also numerous lower-level utility functions and operators: see ?"mvbutils-utils" and ?"mvbutils-operators".

To get the full features of the mvbutils package (in particular, the project organization), you need to start R in the same directory every time (your "ROOT task"), and then switch to whichever project from inside R; see cd. Various options always need to be set to make fixr and the debug package work the way you want, so one advantage of the start-in-the-same directory-approach is that you can keep all your project-independent options(), library loads, etc., in a single .First function, called automatically when you start R. However, most features (including support for the debug package) will probably work even if you don't follow this suggestion.

On loading, the mvbutils package creates a new environment in the search path, called mvb.session.info, which stores some housekeeping information. mvb.session.info is never written to disk, and disappears when the R session finishes. [For Splus users: mvb.session.info is similar to frame 0.] You should never change anything in mvb.session.info by hand, but it is sometimes useful to look at some of the variables there:

Note2

On loading, the present version of package mvbutils compulsorily overwrites a few system functions: library, rbind.data.frame, lockEnvironment. By default, it also overwrites help, savehistory, loadhistory, save.image, difftime, +.POSIXt, and -.POSIXt. (The original version of routine xxx can always be obtained via base.xxx if you really need it.) The modifications should have [almost] no side-effects, and/but I hope to be able to avoid them altogether in future versions of R. Briefly:

If you are certain that you don't want the optional replacements, set options(mvbutils.replacements=FALSE) before loading mvbutils. However, this will prevent cd, fixr, and the flat-documentation help from working properly. You can undo the modification of an individual function called xxx with assign.to.base( "xxx", base.xxx).

ESS.and.'mvbutils'

For ESS users: I'm not an Emacs user and so haven't tried ESS with the mvbutils package myself, but a read-through of the ESS documentation suggests that a couple of ESS variables may need changing to get the two working optimally. Please check the ESS documentation for further details on these points. I will update this helpfile when/if I receive more feedback on what works.

Display bugs: if you have a buggy Unix display where readline() always returns the cursor to the start of the line, overwriting any prompt, then try options( cd.extra.CR=TRUE).

Note

Version 2.2.0 is partly a maintenance fix, and partly a premature release of a major new feature: the easy package-building and maintenance routines. The documentation for the latter is incomplete, and the routines haven't been thoroughly tested except on my own half-dozen packages. (If anyone is brave enough to try the package-related material, I'd appreciate feedback!) The reason for rushing this version out is to deal with a fatal non-back-compatible change deep inside R 2.8; it also sorts out a number of other mostly minor bugs that have hatched or been unearthed since the last CRAN release. I will release a properly-documented version as soon as I can, hopefully with an R-news article to describe the package-maintenance routines.

Author(s)

Mark Bravington

See Also

cd, fixr, mlazy, flatdoc, dochelp, maintain.packages, source.mvb, mlocal, do.in.envir, foodweb, mvbutils-operators, mvbutils-utils, package debug


[Package mvbutils version 2.2.0 Index]