R devel - Mar 2013 - removing union class

Hi,

I get the following error when trying to remove a union class:
> setClassUnion('a', c('matrix', 'numeric'))
> removeClass('a')
>  sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.3 (2013-03-01)
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=en_US.UTF-8
 [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] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base


Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?

Hadley, this is problematic for devtools, because load_all tries to cleanup
S4 classes when an error occurs when loading a development package and
crashes with no hint on the original error.

Thank you.

Bests,
Renaud

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

>>>>> Renaud Gaujoux <renaud at mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za>
>>>>>     on Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:10:44 +0200 writes:
    > Hi,
    > I get the following error when trying to remove a union class:

    >> setClassUnion('a', c('matrix', 'numeric'))
    >> removeClass('a')
    >> sessionInfo()
    > R version 2.15.3 (2013-03-01)
    > 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=en_US.UTF-8
    > [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] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base


    > Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?

Well,... you forgot to show the error (and the traceback) :

  > setClassUnion('a', c('matrix', 'numeric'))
  > removeClass('a')
  Error in .getClassFromCache(Class, where) : node stack overflow

  > traceback()
  1888: .getClassFromCache(Class, where)
  1887: getClass(cl)
  1886: checkAtAssignment("classRepresentation", "contains",
"list")
  1885: .deleteSuperClass(cdef, superclass)
  1884: .removeSuperClass(subclass, superclass)
  ..........
  ..........
  3: .deleteSuperClass(cdef, superclass)
  2: .removeSuperClass(what, Class)
  1: removeClass("a")
  > 

So that looks indeed like a bug in R's  removeClass() or its
helper functions.
Note that this problem is somewhat dependent on the use of the 
infamous "matrix" class {not properly defined as a class in S3,
as it may or may not have dimnames, and then tried to be made S4
compatible "as well as possible" in the methods package, see

  getClass("matrix")

Of course, I could not have thought of a realistic situation
where this was a problem, but then you exemplify one :

    > Hadley, this is problematic for devtools, because load_all tries to
cleanup
    > S4 classes when an error occurs when loading a development package and
    > crashes with no hint on the original error.

    > Thank you.

    > Bests,
    > Renaud

Thank you for the report... although it would have been great if
it had come earlier, as we are approaching feature freeze for
3.0.0 very rapidly.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich