[datatable-help] Inheritance currently needs packages to have a namespace

[Matthew Dowle]

All,

We established that data.table inheritance didn't work
with package rms (bug #1023) thanks to David W for
reporting problems. It turned out to be because rms didn't
have a namespace. Frank very kindly included a namespace
in the latest version of rms v3.1-0 and this fixes the
problem - thanks Frank!

I've added feature request #1074 'Make inheritance work
for namespaceless packages'. I have some ideas how to do
this but it will be tricky. I don't know how many other
namespaceless packages there are, how to find out, or the
demand from users of data.table to use data.table
inheritance with them.

Worst case you just have to pass as.data.frame(DT) to the
namespaceless package, but that will copy and slow things
down.

Please let us know if you come across any more
namespaceless packages you'd like to use with data.table.

Thanks,
Matthew