[Rd] The Depends: field of a package is now used by library()
Deepayan Sarkar
deepayan at stat.wisc.edu
Thu Aug 12 18:24:00 CEST 2004
On Thursday 12 August 2004 10:55, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> I can't think of any other example of one package only needing the
> namespace of another (contributed) package.
That's probably because few packages have namespaces yet. Another
example is nlme which imports lattice, but that's still within
recommended packages. In the long run, hopefully more packages will
start using namespaces when appropriate, so this might become more
relevant.
The only issue I see here is a way to mention namespace requirements in
DESCRIPTION (which could have been done with Depends thus far because
it didn't actually do anything else, even though though the intent has
always been there).
Imported packages are still dependencies in the sense that a package has
to be available for it's namespace to be usable, so leaving them out of
Depends: feels slightly weird, but I can live with it.
Deepayan
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