Re: [Gretl-devel] A way to read RData files in gretl
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Allin Cottrell wrote:
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
> Actually, the flag could be set automatically during the packaging process
> if there's at least one instance of the line
>
> "foreign language=R"
>
> in any of the functions. No manual checking by anybody.
I'd have to check to make sure, but I don't think that's quite right: in
principle an R-dependent package could sidestep "foreign" by using R
functions directly. That requires Rlib access (so far as I remember, haven't
tried this in a while), which would make a package more restrictive in its
set of potential users -- we build in Rlib support in our Windows and Mac
packages, but it's not necessarily present on Linux. On the other hand using
Rlib is more efficient than running the R executable so we wouldn't
necessarily want to ban that in packages.
Hm, that's right. Which leads us back to my previous idea that, if
someone writes a package which depends on R somehow, there's a flag in the
package metadata that should prevent installation on an R-less system. I
don't think that expecting the package writer to set the flag by hand is
too much to ask.
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Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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