Duncan:

Thanks -- learning something new today -- quick follow-up, will using the
import statements in the NAMESPACE, when a user goes to install.packages(),
auto-install the "dependent" packages the same way Depends forces?

--j


On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 13-10-20 4:43 PM, Jonathan Greenberg wrote:
>
>> I'm working on an update for my CRAN package "spatial.tools" and I noticed
>> a new warning when running R CMD CHECK --as-cran:
>>
>> * checking CRAN incoming feasibility ... NOTE
>> Maintainer: 'Jonathan Asher Greenberg <spatial-tools@estarcion.net>'
>> Depends: includes the non-default packages:
>>    'sp' 'raster' 'rgdal' 'mmap' 'abind' 'parallel' 'foreach'
>>    'doParallel' 'rgeos'
>> Adding so many packages to the search path is excessive
>> and importing selectively is preferable.
>>
>> Is this a warning that would need to be fixed pre-CRAN (not really sure
>> how, since I need functions from all of those packages)?  Is there a way
>> to
>> import only a single function from a package, if that function is a
>> dependency?
>>
>
> You really want to use imports.  Those are defined in the NAMESPACE file;
> you can import everything from a package if you want, but the best style is
> in fact to just import exactly what you need.  This is more robust than
> using Depends, and it doesn't add so much to the user's search path, so
> it's less likely to break something else (e.g. by putting a package on the
> path that masks some function the user already had there.)
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>


-- 
Jonathan A. Greenberg, PhD
Assistant Professor
Global Environmental Analysis and Remote Sensing (GEARS) Laboratory
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
259 Computing Applications Building, MC-150
605 East Springfield Avenue
Champaign, IL  61820-6371
Phone: 217-300-1924
http://www.geog.illinois.edu/~jgrn/
AIM: jgrn307, MSN: jgrn307@hotmail.com, Gchat: jgrn307, Skype: jgrn3007

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