[Rd] "Enhances"

[Seth Falcon]

Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
> Now, while we're at it, Debian also has a field called "Enhances:" and IIRC
> it provides a means to communicate a relationship 'the other way'.  Ie a
> package foo, rather than being 'pulled in' by a package bar via a Depends,
> makes itself available to bar.   That is useful as you can enhance the
> 'graph' structure without a change in the other package.  Maybe that would be
> of use for R too?

Such a field DependsOnMe might be useful in some cases, but one can
compute that using the dependency graph.  One just needs a bit of
code...

[shameless plug]

I have an almost complete package 'pkgDepTools' that provides tools
for computing and analyzing dependency relationships among R packages.

It provides tools for building a graph-based representation of the
dependencies among all packages in a list of CRAN-style package
repositories.  There are also utilities for computing installation
order of a given package.  If the RCurl package is available, an
estimate of the download size required to install a given package and
its dependencies can be obtained.

It should be available in Bioconductor in the next couple of weeks.

Bw,

+ seth