Rscript Does Not Load Methods Package, R Does -- Why, and What Are the Consequences

Rscript does not load methods package, R does -- why, and what are the consequences?

According to ?Rscript the methods package isn't loaded because, "The default for Rscript omits methods as it takes about 60% of the startup time."

Why Rscript doesn't work with function as()?

The as function belongs to the methods package. Rscript doesn't load the methods package to save startup time (see the help of Rscript help(Rscript) ). You would have to tell Rscript to load the package.

Rscript could not find function

According to help(Rscript), Rscript doesn't load the methods package by default, because it's time-consuming. So you either need to specify it on the command line:

Rscript --default-packages=methods file.R

Or library(methods) at the top of the file you're calling.

R package not loading `Imports` packages

Summarizing to close, there were a few issues here:

• using packagename::fun() is a good choice, but doesn't work well for operators. Especially with the pipe (%>%), using e.g. a function instead, would defeat it's purpose.

• @importFrom tags are preferable to @import, as this is more narrow and explicit. Both of these affect the NAMESPACE file upon calling roxygen2::roxygenize(). Note however, that roxygen does not mess with user-defined NAMESPACE files, as it is often the case that people would rather take care of it manually themselves (e.g. when a package provides S3 classes and/or methods), and an overwrite by roxygen would then need to be undone. Deleting an existing NAMESPACE file would let roxygen re-create it. Roxygen typically adds a line to the NAMESPACE file to recognize whether it should update it or not:

  # Generated by roxygen2: do not edit by hand

• The dependencies in the DESCRIPTION file are neither modified by roxygen, nor does roxygen add them to the NAMESPACE (note that this would else result in full package imports, which we would rather avoid through @importFrom). The DESCRIPTION file needs to be taken care of manually, making sure that the Imports: section covers all the packages used via the NAMESPACE, i.e. through @import and @importFrom, as well as via packagename::fun()

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