Why does Rcpp::compileAttributes() rewrite the NAMESPACE file?

Question

I know the NAMESPACE file was created by Rcpp.package.skeleton(). But why does Rcpp::compileAttributes() rewrite the NAMESPACE file?

Answer 1

Welcome to StackOverflow. But in short: It doesn't.

Maybe you are calling something else that calls compileAttributes() and another function. Doing it step by step demonstrates that compileAttributes() does NOT modify the NAMESPACE file.

edd@rob:~$ cd /tmp/
edd@rob:/tmp$ Rscript -e 'Rcpp::Rcpp.package.skeleton("demopkg")'
Creating directories ...
Creating DESCRIPTION ...
Creating NAMESPACE ...
Creating Read-and-delete-me ...
Saving functions and data ...
Making help files ...
Done.
Further steps are described in './demopkg/Read-and-delete-me'.

Adding Rcpp settings
 >> added Imports: Rcpp
 >> added LinkingTo: Rcpp
 >> added useDynLib directive to NAMESPACE
 >> added importFrom(Rcpp, evalCpp) directive to NAMESPACE
 >> added example src file using Rcpp attributes
 >> added Rd file for rcpp_hello_world
 >> compiled Rcpp attributes 
edd@rob:/tmp$ cd demopkg/
edd@rob:/tmp/demopkg$ md5sum NAMESPACE    # compute a checksum
2629c850958ab6b8a458474be920afa5  NAMESPACE
edd@rob:/tmp/demopkg$ Rscript -e 'Rcpp::compileAttributes()'
edd@rob:/tmp/demopkg$ md5sum NAMESPACE    # getting same checksum, no change
2629c850958ab6b8a458474be920afa5  NAMESPACE
edd@rob:/tmp/demopkg$