From saveez at hotmail.com  Sun Apr 24 22:12:17 2005
From: saveez at hotmail.com (Ali -)
Date: Sun Apr 24 22:12:25 2005
Subject: [Rd] Collade doesn't work for more than 256 files!
Message-ID: <BAY17-F26F98431F665C5A929328CD12F0@phx.gbl>

Last week I managed to automatically wrap over 600 C++ classes into R in 
less than 24 hours. It was not because I am an expert in R programming, it 
was simply because I wrapped the classes as S3. Not only the wrapping 
process was easy, but also installation process and loading the final 
library was fast too.

Now I am also trying to do the wrapping into the 'modern' S4 classes. This 
is the 5th day I am working on this and I have to say S4 was not design for 
big packages!

(1) Because of its meta-data design, the setClass commands must be sorted in 
the order of inheritance and this is a real pain when it comes to a few 
hundered classes. I wrote some R code to read the annotated source files and 
return the ordered file names.

(2) After all, when I put the ordered file list in front of Collade in the 
DESCRIPTION file, I got this error induring installation:

---------- Making package vtkr ------------
  adding build stamp to DESCRIPTION
Error in .read_description(dfile) : file 'DESCRIPTION' is
not in valid DCF format
Execution halted
make[2]: *** [frontmatter] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [pkg-vtkr] Error 2
*** Installation of vtkr failed ***

After a bit playing with th enumber of th efiles, it seems to me Collade 
cannot handle (probably) more than 256 files.

For many good reasosns,  I am not going to break the package up into 
different pieces. If I am not missing anything here, I hope some R developer 
can let me know about some work around on this bug. (hey even java and 
python don't have this limitation, not sure about Ada83.)


[Rd] Collade doesn't work for more than 256 files!
Ali -