[R] Dependency on R-Forge Package

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Uwe Ligges wrote:

>
>
> On 17.02.2011 15:29, Damian Betebenner wrote:
>> In building a package, is it possible to make the package depend upon 
>> another package that is only available on R-Forge (not CRAN). For example, 
>> by doing something in the DESCRIPTION file
>> I'd like to add a dependency to my package such that when the user install 
>> my package it will automatically install this other package from R-forge as 
>> well.
>
>
> Not completely, the user has to choose R-forge as a repository (which is not 
> the default but easily selectable).

And of course on R-forge being up (and its admins tell me they never 
intended it to be used to distribute packages other than to testers).

However, you can if you want to get your package to install this other 
r-forge package: a package which does that is HSAUR2.  That's 
reasonably sure to work if the r-forge package does not contain 
compiled code (just using install.packages(type="source")).  Otherwise 
you depend on R-forge having built the binary for the end user's 
platform.

For the record, some of us are pretty unhappy about CRAN packages 
having off-CRAN dependencies (and have talked about adding metadata 
to say where such packages should be located) and would be very 
unhappy about an R-forge one.

>
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
>
>> 
>> Any help greatly appreciated.
>> 
>> Damian
>> 
>>
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> 
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>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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