[Rd] The Depends: field of a package is now used by library()

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Thu Aug 12 17:20:52 CEST 2004


On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Wolfgang Huber wrote:

> > On Thursday 12 August 2004 07:34, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> > 
> >>In R-devel, the Depends: field in the DESCRIPTION file is now used by
> >>library() to load the named packages before the current package, and
> >>also to set up the environment to save images and prepare for lazy
> >>loading.
> > 
> 
> Are circular dependencies allowed?
> Or do they need to be broken, e.g. by replacing one of the edges in a 
> loop by a "suggests"?

They need to be broken.  I only encountered them where Suggests: was 
appropriate.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



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