From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Sat Dec 13 14:09:02 2008
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 13:09:02 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: [Rd] Recent bug fixes to body<- need 'methods' re-installed
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0812131258260.30710@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

If you update a build of R-devel or R-patched from an SVN checkout you 
will need to ensure that 'methods' is rebuilt (rm -r library/methods/R 
suffices) once you see today's updates to src/library/base/R/formals.R.

The reason is the long-standing infelicity that when you create an S4 
generic for a function, it _copies_ the existing function as the default 
method rather than create a call to the existing function.  This happens 
for body<- in the methods package itself, which in a vanilla session will 
mask the bug-fixed version in base.

'make check' will fail in R-devel but not in R-patched if 'methods' is not 
rebuilt.

A clean build, including one from a tarball, will not have the problem.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] Recent bug fixes to body<- need 'methods' re-installed
Prof Brian Ripley