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.