R devel - Oct 2024 - Could .Primitive("[") stop forcing R_Visible = TRUE?

My message below sounds a little aggressive, I apologize in advance for 
that.  But I can't think of better wording.

This is a small change, which will have a small benefit, mainly for the 
data.table authors, who really brought it on themselves by choosing to 
(ab)use R extraction syntax to have side effects.  Surely you or they 
should be the ones to run the test across all of CRAN?

Duncan Murdoch

On 2024-10-25 6:35 a.m., Ivan Krylov via R-devel wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:23:56 -0400
> Toby Hocking <tdhock5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> The patch you are proposing to base R is
>>
https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/issues/6566#issuecomment-2428912338
>> right?
> 
> Yes, it's this one, thank you for providing the link.
> 
> Surprisingly, a very cursory check of 100 packages most downloaded from
> cloud.r-project.org in the last month resulted in only one change to
> worse: it's the data.table's own test of auto-printing behaviour.
But
> there might still be breakage we don't see yet.
>

? Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:39:39 -0400
Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> ?????:
> Surely you or they should be the ones to run the test across all of
> CRAN?
That's fair. The question is, is there a fundamental reason I
overlooked to deny such a change? Except for positioning and
whitespace, the line has been in names.c since SVN revision 2. The
one regression test touched by the change has been there since 2010.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan