On StackOverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/q/63409565/2554330), a user was confused by the error messages from R when the DESCRIPTION file for his package specified

  Imports:  stats >= 4.0.2

The message from an attempted source build in R 3.6.1 said:

  Warning in install.packages :
    dependency ‘stats’ is not available
  installing the source package ‘doebioresearch’

and later

Error in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :
    namespace 'stats' 3.6.1 is already loaded, but >= 4.0.2 is required
Calls: <Anonymous> ... namespaceImportFrom -> asNamespace -> loadNamespace
  Execution halted

Would it be worth giving an error or warning right away based on the Imports line? It doesn't make sense to specify the version of a base package. If he had specified R >= 4.0.2 I think the messages for R 3.6.1 users would have been less confusing.

Duncan Murdoch

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