[Rd] Conditional "Suggests"
Geoff Jentry
geoffjentry at hexdump.org
Mon Apr 11 20:34:06 CEST 2011
Hi ...
I came across an old post on R-devel that describes a situation very
similar to one I find myself in:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-December/043917.html
As you can see in Gregor's example, the situation is that if I am writing
Pkg A, I want to detect if Pkg B exists - if so use some functionality
from there, otherwise do something else.
To me this reads as being in the wheelhouse of what 'Suggests' is supposed
to imply, as per the R Extensions manual. The problem here is that if
PkgB is put down as 'Suggests', it is required for R CMD check to pass
which seems to defeat the purpose of this exercise a bit.
If one puts it as 'Enhances' one gets a NOTE earlier in check but then the
WARNING described in this post due to the require() call.
Is there a good way around this situation, such that the PkgA can pass a R
CMD check if PkgB doesn't exist on the system, for instance a case where
PkgB isn't available for a particular OS? If there are multiple methods
around this problem, is one more blessed by the powers that be than
others?
Thanks
-J
More information about the R-devel
mailing list