[Rd] build time dependency

[Romain Francois]

On 09/27/2009 08:27 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
>
> Romain Francois wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is there such thing as a build time dependency between packages :
>> package B needs package A so that it can build, but once built it
>> lives without it.
>
>
> Do you mean at a) "R CMD build" time or at b) "R CMD INSTALL" time?

I meant R CMD INSTALL (but probably also R CMD build --binary), I need 
to check the code to see where this overlaps.


> For a), you probably do not need to declare it in DESCRIPTION at all
> (untested).
> For b), you need to declare it. I feel uncomfortable to change the
> Depends field between source and binary version of a package. At least,
> it is not documented to work and if it works (have you tested that?), it
> might not work in some future release of R.
> But since you gave at least 2 reasonable examples for a
> INSTALL-time-only dependency, you might want to contribute some patches
> to handle such a thing.

Sure. I'll have a look to add a "InstallDependencies" (or whatever other 
spelling) field along the lines of Depends, but for INSTALL time.

Romain

>
> Best wishes,
> Uwe
>
>
>> For example depending on the ant package to compile java code, or
>> depend on roxygen to roxygenize the code, ...
>>
>> Adding roxygen to Depends works, but then the installed package does
>> not depend on it and therefore loads it for nothing. Maybe I can
>> remove roxygen from the Depends as part of the ./configure[.win] ...
>>
>> Romain
>>

-- 
Romain Francois
Professional R Enthusiast
+33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
|- http://tr.im/ztCu : RGG #158:161: examples of package IDPmisc
|- http://tr.im/yw8E : New R package : sos
`- http://tr.im/y8y0 : search the graph gallery from R