From pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca  Wed Dec 20 23:20:48 2000
From: pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca (Paul Gilbert)
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 18:20:48 -0500
Subject: [Rd] syskern fails Rcmd check on Windows, gives incorrect information (PR#781)
References: <200012201112.MAA15286@pubhealth.ku.dk>
Message-ID: <3A413ED0.DC3D6CC9@bank-banque-canada.ca>

Brian

I have a new version of syskern which takes advantage of the new
features you have added in R 1.2. I just sent details to Fritz. I'm
sorry that I am a bit slow getting it to CRAN, the release of R 1.2 came
at a very busy time for me. In the future, if you give me a bit more
warning when you are going to test packages with a brand new release of
R, I can probably save you some time by telling you what problems to
expect.

I believe most of syskern now uses standard features of R, so almost
everything should work on all platforms on which R 1.2 works. The main
outstanding facility is a mail interface, which you indicated previously
is problematic in Windows. In any case, it would be useful to
standardize R's side of this so that R programs, like mine and also
bug.report(), can use a program mail() which works on some platforms and
may eventually work on others.

>syskern (`Functions for writing code that is OS and R/S independent' an

>amazing description given the reality

I think you are mis-reading this. If you would like to suggest better
phrasing then that may be helpful. The intention was not to provide the
OS-independent functions as you have now done in R. The intention was to
provide an R-side definition of these functions so that I (and others)
could write R programs in a standardized way to use these facilities
when they became available in R. I kludged a Unix version of the
facilities and invited others to do Windows and Mac versions. Five years
ago when R was still young I needed these facilities to use in R
programs, and it has worked very well. It was very little work for me to
take advantage of the new features in R 1.2. I expect my versions will
become depreciated in R and their main use will be to provide S with
similar names for the same facilities, but there are still a few issues
so it is too early to depreciate them yet.

Seasons Greetings,
Paul


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[Rd] syskern fails Rcmd check on Windows, gives incorrect information (PR#781)
Paul Gilbert