R devel - Nov 2012 - Puzzling behavior while testing

I'm testing a new release of survival, executing the following piece of
code:

....
for (testpkg in survdep) {
     z <- testInstalledPackage(testpkg, outDir="tests")
     cat(testpkg, c("Ok", "Failed")[z+1], "\n",
file="progress", append=T)
}

The vector survdep contains the names of all 156 packages listed as reverse
depends on the
CRAN page for survival.

All works well except for the packages coin and compareGroups.  If we make the
survdep
list contain only those 2 then the last line above "cat..." fails with
"testpkg not
found".  Running ls() at that point shows a set of variables I didn't
define, and no
evidence of any of "testpkg", "survdep", or anything else
I'd defined.  My prompt has been
changed to "R>" as well.

Any idea what is happening?

Terry Therneau

Here is the text just before starting the loop
 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: i686-pc-linux-gnu (32-bit)

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=C
  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
  [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C
  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

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