test.data.table() creates DT in .GlobalEnv

It shouldn't be touching .GlobalEnv

> require(data.table)  # 1.14.4 and before
> DT
Error: object 'DT' not found   # correct error
> test.data.table()
All 10039 tests (last 2163) in tests/tests.Rraw.bz2 completed ok in 36.8s elapsed (48.6s cpu)
> DT
   a
1: 1

Tests are already run in their own environment to isolate from .GobalEnv. That works well. But test 2036 uses source() which needs a local=TRUE adding.

add local=TRUE to source() in test 2036 to stop it overwriting DT in …

It would be great if we could lockEnvironment(.GlovalEnv), but for some strange reason R apparently doesn't offer any way to unlockEnvironment() afterwards. There are apparently some ways to hack together an unlockEnvironment() in C, see e.g. here, but I'd rather not do that.

Good idea. Agree that's strange unlockEnvironment() doesn't exist.
Then how about save.image() before and after and binary compare. That could be a concern in a user's environment perhaps if they had large or sensitive data in .GlobalEnv and they ran test.data.table(). So it could be done in CRAN_Release.cmd and/or GLCI.

CRAN_Release.cmd: check .GlobalEnv not altered by test.data.table() t…

Using 1.14.4 I checked that those commands added to CRAN_Release would have found this DT being written, and that there are no others. No others in dev as of now either.

Agree it's probably best to handle in GLCI (with an environment variable) or in CRAN_release, because it's fine to lockEnvironment(.GlobalEnv) as long as the session exits after running the test.

Good point. In that case it would need to be lockEnvironment(.GlobalEnv, bindings=TRUE) otherwise it appears from reading ?lockEnvironment that existing variables could still be changed with the default bindings=FALSE.

I wonder if lockEnvironment(.GlobalEnv, bindings=TRUE) would prevent .Last and .Random.seed from being created/changed. Those aren't assigned by us but by base R. Those were picked up by the diff method so I excluded them in e956716.

Maybe lockEnvironment(.GlobalEnv, bindings=TRUE); unlockBinding(".Last", .GlobalEnv); unlockBinding(".Random.seed") would work; i.e. lock all bindings other than .Last and .Random.seed. They could be created first by dummy calls to the R functions that create them, or setting them to NULL might be enough just to ensure the bindings exist before locking the environment after which new bindings can't be created.

otherwise it appears... existing variables could still be changed...

Oh, good catch, yes, I assumed bindings=TRUE was the default.

They could be created first by dummy calls to the R functions that create them, or setting them to NULL

Either way, should be easy enough to play. The latter looks cleaner but the risk is if some R code assume's they're non-NULL or length()>0.

(textproc/R-data.table) Updated 1.14.0 to 1.14.10

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test.data.table() creates DT in .GlobalEnv #5514

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test.data.table() creates DT in .GlobalEnv #5514

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MichaelChirico commented on Nov 8, 2022

mattdowle commented on Nov 9, 2022

mattdowle commented on Nov 9, 2022

MichaelChirico commented on Nov 9, 2022

mattdowle commented on Nov 9, 2022

mattdowle commented on Nov 9, 2022

MichaelChirico commented on Nov 10, 2022

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