[Rd] Vignette Questions

[Claudia Beleites]

Dear List,

I recently stumbled over the possibility and need to specifiy
% \VignetteDepends{}
in my vignettes. I did not know about this, and I notice that it is not 
mentioned in the R-extensions manual section "Writing package vignettes".

I have some questions with regards to that:

- would it be possible to include into the section "Writing package 
vignettes" some hint that besides \VignetteIndexEntry also
\VignetteDepends{}
\VignetteKeywords{}
\VignettePackage{}
exist (and should be used)?
Also a link to the R-News Paper "Sweave, Part II: Package Vignettes" may 
be very helpful.

- Is the documentation of these somewhere else where I didn't find it?

- Are there more such commands?

- Is there a way to ask R CMD check to check whether all dependencies of 
the vignettes are correctly specified?
Of course, on my computer all required packages are available...

- Which dependencies should go into \VignetteDepends{}?
Only those without Priority in the packageDescription, or also 
recommended packages, or maybe even base packages?
Should I specify the package that the vignette belongs to itself?

- Related, but slightly different: is there a way to temporarily enforce 
that specified packages should not be loaded (or that only specified 
packages are allowed to be loaded)?
I have a few functions in my package that do use e.g. plotrix if it is 
available but otherwise should work in a less fancy way.
Till now I test them on an old computer where I didn't install those 
packages but that's quite a hassle.

Thank you very much for your kind help!

Claudia Beleites

--
Claudia Beleites
Dipartimento dei Materiali e delle Risorse Naturali
Università degli Studi di Trieste
Via Valerio 2
I-34127 Trieste
ITALY

email: cbeleites at units.it
phone: +39 (0 40) 5 58-34 68