From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Thu Dec 29 22:09:31 2005
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 16:09:31 -0500
Subject: [Rd] 'sessionInfo()' instead of 'version'
In-Reply-To: <7DB3F7A9-DC60-41D5-BC21-A0C264CEEDD1@uiuc.edu>
References: <43B42B58.6010400@acm.org>
	<7DB3F7A9-DC60-41D5-BC21-A0C264CEEDD1@uiuc.edu>
Message-ID: <43B4508B.2080209@stats.uwo.ca>

On 12/29/2005 3:07 PM, roger koenker wrote:
> In a private response to Tony Plate's suggestion to replace version()
> output with sessionInfo() in R-help requests,
> 
> 
>>roger koenker wrote:
>>
>>>Thanks for this, it would seem useful to have version numbers for
>>>the packages too?
> 
> 
> and Tony replied,
> 
>>Sounds sensible to me!  If I were you I'd send a message to R-devel  
>>suggesting this.  AFAIK, some changes to sessionInfo() are already  
>>being considered, so this is a good time to suggest that.
> 
> 
> So, for what it is worth....
> 
> Roger
> 
> PS  My notion is that it is sometimes useful to document the state of  
> play
> when a particular object was created, much like the recent thread on
> date stamping of objects in R-help.

I'm not sure what you're asking for.  This is what I see in R-patched; 
it's very similar to what 2.1.1 shows:

 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.2.1, 2005-12-27, i386-pc-mingw32

attached base packages:
[1] "splines"   "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"
[7] "datasets"  "base"

other attached packages:
multtest survival
  "1.8.0"   "2.20"

There's no point showing the versions of base packages, because they 
match the R version.  What other information would you like to see?

So far the following reasonable suggestions have been made.  I forget 
where they were posted, so you may not have seen them:

  - the Subversion revision number, at least for non-released versions
  - the version number of the GUI, at least for OS X (where it changes 
independently of R).

Duncan Murdoch



[Rd] 'sessionInfo()' instead of 'version'
Duncan Murdoch