revdeps broken by DT[, j=<expr>:<expr] being with=TRUE

[MichaelChirico]

A number of revdeps were broken by db3cbb4 (#4460):

MetaIntegrator
SOMnmR
VoxR
categoryEncodings
flextable
hesim
iml
immunarch
kalmanfilter
polypharmacy
sentometrics
sjtable2df

I haven't looked into the root cause(s) yet.

[MichaelChirico]

OK, here's an MRE (not sure if it covers everything):

DT=data.table(a=1,b=2)
DT[,1:ncol(DT)]

# ** on CRAN
#        a     b
#    <num> <num>
# 1:     1     2

# ** on master
DT[, 1:ncol(DT)]
# [1] 1 2

At a glance, we need to be more selective & make sure all(all.vars(jsub) %in% names(x)) before switching to with=TRUE.

[MichaelChirico]

#6487 solved everything, nice 😎

[jangorecki]

@MichaelChirico If this fix is also going to be in 1.16.2 (I haven't see it merged to patch branch, but feels like it fits there, no?) then we should assign it to that milestone instead.

[MichaelChirico]

no, original breakage #6487 was only in dev