[Rd] Rcmdr package dependencies

[John Fox]

Dear r-devel members,

My Rcmdr package "depends" on several other packages (tcltk, grDevices,
utils, and car) and "suggests" a number of others (abind, aplpack,
colorspace, effects, foreign, grid, Hmisc, lattice, leaps, lmtest, MASS,
mgcv, multcomp, nlme, nnet, relimp, rgl, and RODBC). The reason for the
distinction is that I don't want all of these packages to load when the
Rcmdr loads; rather, the "suggested" packages are loaded as they're needed.
But all of the packages -- both those under "depends" and those under
"suggests" -- really are necessary for all of the features of the Rcmdr to
work. For example, if the "leaps" package is absent, then the "Subset model
selection" item in the "Models" menu is suppressed.

This arrangement works reasonably well, but it makes it awkward to install
the Rcmdr. If the user issues the command install.packages("Rcmdr"), then
the "suggested" packages aren't installed. On the other hand, if the user
issues the command install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies=TRUE), which is
what I currently recommend, then "suggested" packages are installed
recursively, causing dozens of packages, most of them actually unnecessary,
to be installed. This issue has been growing more acute, and at this point
even with a fast Internet connection it takes quite a while for all of the
dependencies to download and install.

I wonder whether I've missed something. Is there a way for me to arrange the
Rcmdr package dependencies so that only the necessary packages (those
currently listed under both "depends" and "suggests" and the packages on
which they "depend") are installed along with the Rcmdr, but the currently
"suggested" packages aren't loaded when the Rcmdr loads?

Any help would be appreciated.

John 

------------------------------
John Fox, Professor
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox