On 2 August 2016 at 13:12, Duncan Murdoch wrote: | On 02/08/2016 1:01 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: | > | > On 2 August 2016 at 11:36, Joshua Ulrich wrote: | > | Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't that the point of calling | > | requireNamespace()? For example: | > | if (requireNamespace("suggestedPackage")) | > | stop("suggestedPackage required but not installed") | > | | > | That doesn't seem like a heavy burden for package writers when writing | > | infrequently used functions in their package. You could even add the | > | install.packages command to the error message to instruct users to | > | install the required package. | > | > [...] | > | > | I personally would not want install.packages() to install packages I'm | > | unlikely to actually use. | > | | > | It's also not clear to me how importing rarely used functions causes | > | bloat, but installing all packages for all rarely-used functions does | > | not cause bloat. | > | > Sadly, some people whose advocacy is taken as religous gospel in some | > circles, particularly beginners, advocate pretty much that: treat Suggests: | > as Depends: and install it anyway because, hell, why would one tests. | > | > I regularly run (large) reverse depends checks against some of my more widely | > used packages and run into this all the time. | > | > We (as a community, including CRAN whose gatekeepers I have failed to | > convince about this on on multiple attempts) are doing this wrong. | > "Suggests:" really means optionally, rather than unconditionally. But it | > would appear that you and I are about to only ones desiring that behaviour. | | I thought I understood Joshua's point (and agreed with it), but you also | seem to be agreeing with him and I don't understand at all what you're | saying. | | What is "this" in your last paragraph, that you have failed to convince | CRAN gatekeepers about?
It is really simple: Having _both_ Suggests: foo _and_ an unconditonal call to foo::bar() in the code. Whereas Josh and I argue that it needs to be conditional on requireNames() coming back TRUE. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel