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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

To close off this thread --

After various offline discussions we have adopted the new field Imports: 
(thanks, Martin Maechler, for the name) which should list namespaces that 
are required to load the package (via imports in the NAMESPACE file or use 
of :: or :::) but do not need to be attached as packages.

Depends: should be used for packages that need to be attached before the 
current package, and should be disjoint from Imports.


On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:

> 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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-- 
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)
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