[R] Warnings using MASS Library

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, Williams, Brian wrote:

> I am running R version 1.7.1.  In the process of checking the results from
> some code against the results obtained from version 1.5.1, I encountered a
> set of warning messages upon exiting from the session:
> 
> Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: y
> Warning messages:
> 1:  namespaces may not be available when loading
> 2:  names in persistent strings are currently ignored
> 
> This happened only after loading the MASS library and running glm.nb.
> 
> I have read the postings of other users who have encountered these warnings.
> The solutions suggested did not solve the problem for me (e.g. running
> update.packages(), not surprising since I'm running the latest version of
> MASS [7.1-8]).

Those solutions were for errors, not warnings.

> Is there anything I can do that will cause these messages to disappear?  Can
> I safely ignore them?

Yes, you can safely ignore them.  They are intended to warn you that the
resulting .RData may not be loadable into earlier versions of R.

If you can send me a session that exhibits this I can look into 
circumventing those warnings.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595