From therneau at mayo.edu  Thu Mar 29 16:01:56 2012
From: therneau at mayo.edu (Terry Therneau)
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:01:56 -0500
Subject: [Rd] CRAN policies
In-Reply-To: <mailman.19.1333015207.14516.r-devel@r-project.org>
References: <mailman.19.1333015207.14516.r-devel@r-project.org>
Message-ID: <4F746B54.2050601@mayo.edu>

On 03/29/2012 05:00 AM, r-devel-request at r-project.org wrote:
> The 'No visible binding for global variable" is a good example.  This
> found some bugs in my 'survey' package, which I removed. There is
> still one note of this type, which arises when I have to handle two
> different versions of the hexbin package with different internal
> structures.  The note is a false positive because the use is guarded
> by an if(), but  CMD check can't tell this.   So, it's a good idea to
> remove all Notes that can be removed without introducing other code
> problems, which is nearly all of them, but occasionally there may be a
> good reason for code that produces a Note.
The survival package has a similar special case: the routines for 
expected population survival are set up to accept multiple types of date 
format so have lines like
     if (class(x) == 'chron') { y <- as.numeric(x - chron("01/01/1960")}
This leaves me with two extraneous "no visible binding" messages.  There 
used to be half a dozen but I've tried to remove as many as possible, 
for all the good reasons already articulated by the maintainers.

It still remains that 99/100 of the "no visible binding" messages I've 
seen over the years were misspelled variable names, and the message is a 
very welcome check.

Terry Therneau



[Rd] CRAN policies
Terry Therneau