On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Uwe Ligges <lig...@statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
> I do not see any problem in R. If someone is going to import a Namespace, he > or she has to do that via import directives in the NAMESPACE file. If > someone is going to have a package on the search path, he or she has to > require() it. The DESCRIPTION file is used to derive the dependency > structures among packages for installation order, check order etc. I am not sure everyone is aware of this. Many package authors seem to be assuming that having a package in the Depends field of the DESCRIPTION is a sufficient condition for having the dependency package available at runtime, regardless of how the function is invoked by the user. I think this is the usual meaning of a dependency. There are a lot of packages on CRAN that use Depends and are not explicitly importing anything. Among others, this holds for any package without a NAMESPACE file. Also looking at the definition of the 'Depends' field in the 'writing r extensions' manual there is not a single hint that Depends is not sufficient for having the package available at runtime, and any function that is used should still be manually imported or required() as you suggest. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
