devtools functions for loading packages

[wlandau-lilly]

In addition to detecting library(), require(), and requireNamespace(), what are your thoughts on load_all(), load_code(), and load_data() from devtools?

[gmbecker]

It's an interesting question. load_all, certainly, is "roughly analogous" to library, though is that the one that dumps everything into the "namespace" of the package, rather than following the NAMESPACE file?

Although, from a practical perspective, I'd argue that while those functions may be useful during the process of package development, but they shouldn't really be appearing in script code (as that should use actual, well-formed packages).

Also if you're calling those functions with no arguments the default is ".", and we don't have any idea what that is at static-analysis time, so we can't be sure we are grabbing the right directory. We could assume it's the same as the directory you're doing the static analysis from, but that may not be a safe assumption generally.

Let me think about it some more.

[wlandau-lilly]

@gmbecker Definitely reasonable concerns. Also, load_all() seems to rely on the NAMESPACE file to detect imports and dependencies, but it loads the local source and dumps it into a "namespace" without needing to look at NAMESPACE. (I tested by deleting NAMESPACE from one of my own packages just now.) And it attaches all the package's functions, not just the exported ones.