John Nash and Arkajyoti Bhattacharjee package things up:
This article tries to explain an approach to developing alternative versions of functions which are in the distributed base of R. Our interest was in developing improvements to the
nls()function and related features in R as part of a Google Summer of Code project for which Arkajyoti Bhattacharjee was the funded student. However,nls()has many tentacles involving a number of files and functions that may or may not be called asnls()is executed.Part of the difficulty in carrying out such development of alternative versions is that one needs to be able to execute the new variants in parallel with the existing ones. A heavy-effort approach would be to have separate full sets of R code and build each system and run them separately. That is, we want to have two or more versions of R in the same computing system.
Read on for the process, some difficulties you might encounter along the way, and specific issues you might run into on Windows. H/T R-Bloggers.