What's the recommended way/workflow of contacting the R Core Team in order to propose feature requests?
By "feature requests" I do not simply mean firing something like "I'd like to see functionality XY doing XY, so it'd be cool if you'd go ahead and implement that for me" but proposing actual code instead.
I love R and am willing to contribute, share code and all. Yet sometimes I find it a bit hard to figure out just exactly how to contribute ;-) I've looked at the R Project Developer Page and used the r-devel mailing list a couple of times. Especially with respect to the latter, I've gotten the impression that it's not the right place / not desired to elaborate one's feature request with actual code (which can sometimes be more than just a two liner). So I wonder if there's a "better" or more "systematical" way in order to do that.
I was asked to provide a short example:
I'm using S4 Reference Classes extensively and implemented a lot of little utility functions for my objects. One such utility function is some sort of a "reset" functionality:
setRefClass(
"A",
fields=list(a="numeric", b="character"),
methods=list(
reset=function(fields=NULL, ...){
temp <- new("A")
if(is.null(fields)){
fields <- names(getRefClass("A")$fields())
}
sapply(fields, function(x){
.self$field(name=x, value=temp$field(x))
})
return(TRUE)
}
)
)
x <- new("A", a=1:10, b=letters[1:10])
x$a
x$b
x$reset(fields="a")
x$a
x$b
x$reset()
x$a
x$b
Quite often, it's not the fanciest feature in the world that pops up on my "oh, that's missing" list. Plus it might be such a "singular" function that developing a whole package sometimes feels like cracking the nut with a sledgehammer.
This is a great question. While really liking R a lot, I find its development model frustrating at times. I would say the best options are
[email protected]. Although the archives don't provide a search interface, you can do a Google search prefixed with site:stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel (e.g. site:stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel sweep). Nabble also provides a searchable interface but is ugly and ad-heavy ...sweep a few years ago (having it actually complain about mismatched dimensions rather than silently returning the wrong answer), but only after proposing the idea; waiting a week; re-raising the idea; sending some prototype code; testing it to make sure it didn't cause a performance hit; further discussion ...plotrix package, which is a compilation of small plotting utilities), and contact the maintainer/author.