[rkward-devel] First release candidate of RKWard 0.5.4 / SVN open for new features

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

On Monday 14 February 2011, meik michalke wrote:
> when i understood that you put the instance of R into a seperate process, i
> was wondering if it would be possible to use that to elegantly solve the
> above issue. i'm thinking of being able to restart the R engine alone,
> without the need to quit RKWard. it would be really great for package
> development, if you just had to press a button or call some
> rkward.R.restart() function to cleanly "reload" the whole recent workspace
> in a new instance of R. the just added functions to save/open your session
> might be of use here as well, as somehow RKWard would need to preserve
> your working enviroment (opened script files could remain as they are, but
> things like help pages and editor windows would have to be refreshed at
> least).
> 
> can you follow me?

I think, I can follow you, yes. This would be theoretically possible, indeed, 
and it does not appear insanely difficult. However, it's not quite easy, either. 
A number of steps of the initialization sequence would have to be repeated, 
and figuring out, just what should be done again, what needs to be updated, and 
what should remain untouched is not entirely trivial. Thus, I'm not sure it's 
worth to invest the required effort into a backend-restart-feature.

I'm rather thinking about working towards lessening the pain of restarting 
RKWard as a whole. I.e. most importantly, making more aspects of the 
session/"workplace" restorable (including window placement, etc.; I guess the 
lack of this is what makes restarting RKWard feel so cumbersome?). This is not 
exactly less work, but there are more common usecases for this, besides 
package development.

Of course I do see the merit of a separate backend-restart-feature, and so you 
could add this to our feature request tracker, if you like. But it's unlikely 
that I will dig into this, any time soon.

Regards
Thomas
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