[BioC] c()ombining G/IRanges with elementMetadata: feature inquiry/request

[Steve Lianoglou]

Sorry that this thread went cold, but I'm hoping we can come to some consensus:

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Martin Morgan <mtmorgan at fhcrc.org> wrote:
[snip]
> just trying not to get stuck on values / elementMetadata. what about
> append / rbind, thinking either that append works w/out element
> metadata, or that c does and rbind (in the GRanges-are-row-indicies on
> values() interpretation; not suitable for IRanges?) / append tries to do
> something with element metadata.
[/snip]

I think my preference would be to have all of these treated the same
.. which would mean to error on rbind/c'ing *Ranges with different
cols in their elementMetadata, and include an option to drop their
elementMetadata when you combine them.

I feel like the elementMetadata in IRanges isn't thought of "as
important" as the ones for GRanges, but I (myself) don't really
differentiate between the two.

Also, I think exposing the same functionality like what's in
IRanges:::.rbind.elementMetadata so that several such
elementMetadata's can be massaged in a manner that allows them to be
combined w/o losing their respective info would also be helpful.

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact