[Rd] Rcmdr package dependencies

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Create a package called RcmdrInstall, say, with no content and have it
depend on Rcmdr.  RcmdrInstall would have all packages as dependencies
while Rcmdr would only have the essential packages as dependencies.

Install RcmdrInstall.  That would also force Rcmdr to be installed.

Now issue:

   library(Rcmdr)

as before and the non-essentials won't be loaded.

Thus the only difference between the current procedure and the new
procedure as far as the user is concerned is that they install
RcmdrInstall rather than Rcmdr.  They load and run Rcmdr in the same
way.

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:15 AM, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> 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
>
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