Release candidates for plyr 1.8 and ggplot2 0.9.3

[Winston Chang]

Hi everyone -

(We've bcc'd everyone who's a maintainer of a package that depends, imports or suggests ggplot2 or plyr.)

We have prepared release candidates (RCs) for plyr 1.8 and ggplot2 0.9.3, which we plan to release to CRAN simultaneously. Unless there are major unexpected bugs, they will be in the RC phase for a about a month before they are sent to CRAN on December 1.

The purpose of the RC phase is to uncover unexpected bugs in ggplot2 and plyr. These releases do not include any changes that we expect to break existing code, but we hope that this period will allows to uncover any unexpected changes and remedying them before releasing to CRAN. The next version of ggplot2 (0.9.3) contains primarily bugfixes, while the next version of plyr (1.8) has a number of new features and performance enhancements. For the full list of changes, see:

  https://github.com/hadley/ggplot2/blob/master/NEWS

  https://github.com/hadley/plyr/blob/master/NEWS

It would be very helpful if you could try out the RC version and see if it breaks any of your existing code.  To try out the the new versions, run the following code:

  install.packages("devtools")

  library(devtools)

  install_github("plyr", ref = "plyr-1.8-rc")

  install_github("gtable", ref = "gtable-0.1.2-rc")

  install_github("scales", ref = "scales-0.2.3-rc")

  install_github("ggplot2", ref = "ggplot2-0.9.3-rc")

After installation has completed, you will need to restart R. Then you can test your existing code that uses plyr and ggplot2.

Installation notes:

This will install plyr from source, which requires that you have a C compiler on your system. Please see this page for information about that (it also describes installing LaTeX, but that's not necessary here):

  http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/packages/prerequisites

Installing with dev_mode():

Installing the RC versions of these packages is slightly different from usual. Unlike the usual method, these can NOT be installed with the dev_mode() function from devtools, which is normally used to keep development and released packages separate. This is because devtools indirectly depends on plyr and when you load devtools, it will load the version of plyr in your normal library (not your development library). Thus the new version of plyr must be installed NOT in dev_mode(). (If you really require a workaround for this, it is possible; please send an email to the manipulatr mailing list.)

If you encounter any problems with the new version, please post to either the ggplot2-dev or manipulatr mailing lists, or file an issue on Github.

Thanks!

Winston Chang

Hadley Wickham

[Winston Chang]

I've been asked how to use the new version of plyr with dev_mode. It requires one extra step, and I've written it up here:

  https://gist.github.com/4025674

-Winston

[Winston Chang]

Apologies for the spamming - I had the wrong URL in my previous message. The correct one is:

  https://gist.github.com/4025734

[Bryan Hanson]

Winston et al: When I try the recommended installation of plyr 1.8 in dev_mode, I get the following:

d> install_github("plyr", ref = "plyr-1.8-rc")
...
* DONE (plyr)
Reloading installed plyr
unloadNamespace("plyr") not successful. Forcing unload.
Error in rm(name, ns_registry()) :
  ... must contain names or character strings

Then,

d> devtools:::unregister_namespace('plyr')
Error in rm(name, ns_registry()) :
  ... must contain names or character strings
d> library("plyr")
d> packageVersion("plyr")
[1] ‘1.7.1’

Am I doing something wrong?  Thanks, Bryan

d> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0/x86_64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

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

other attached packages:
[1] plyr_1.7.1   devtools_0.8 sos_1.3-1    brew_1.0-6 

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] digest_0.5.2    evaluate_0.4.2  httr_0.2        memoise_0.1     parallel_2.15.1
[6] RCurl_1.95-3    stringr_0.6.1   tools_2.15.1    whisker_0.1

[Winston Chang]

Bryan - I think you're hitting a bug in devtools 0.8 that involves forced unloading of packages. :( It was fixed shortly after the devtools 0.8 release.

You should be able to sidestep this issue by installing the development version of devtools. Of course, you'll have to do this outside of dev_mode:

library(devtools)

dev_mode(on = FALSE)  # Make sure you're NOT in dev_mode

install_github('devtools')

Then you can restart R and try the procedure again. Please let us know if this work or doesn't work for you.

-Winston

[Bryan Hanson]

That got it working.  Thank you.  Over in the gist, where it says 'If you are in a new R session, you would do this:' it should really read close R and start a fresh session.  It wouldn't work w/o a fresh session.

Now on to the original task of testing the RC's.  Thanks, Bryan