[Rd] library( ) and verbose=

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jul 11, 2004, at 1:07 PM, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

> The Hmisc package has in its .First.lib function a verbose argument,
> which I thought was the way to allow users to suppress certain 
> messages,
> by issuing library(Hmisc, verbose=FALSE).  But I see that library( )
> does not pass verbose to .First.lib.  The default for verbose in Hmisc
> is TRUE because .First.lib prints some important information about
> masked functions.  What is the best way to fix this?

AFAIR the official way to suppress unwanted messages is 
warn.conflicts=FALSE so the user probably wants to issue
library(Hmisc, warn.conflicts=FALSE).
As of 'verbose' - it is not by default TRUE - it's actually determined 
by the current "verbose" option, so users can actually change the 
default as desired.
On the other hand .First.lib takes only two, fixed arguments, so AFAIK 
you cannot pass any additional arguments from outside (I believe this 
applies to .onLoad and friends, too).
In fact I'm not quite sure what you want to "fix" here .. is it the 
wish in general to be able to pass arguments to packages while being 
loaded? In your specific case I'd say you don't need that since you 
have always access to the 'verbose' option ...

Simon