[R-pkg-devel] Handling Not-Always-Needed Dependencies?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 02/08/2016 1:01 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>
> On 2 August 2016 at 11:36, Joshua Ulrich wrote:
> | Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't that the point of calling
> | requireNamespace()?  For example:
> | if (requireNamespace("suggestedPackage"))
> |   stop("suggestedPackage required but not installed")
> |
> | That doesn't seem like a heavy burden for package writers when writing
> | infrequently used functions in their package.  You could even add the
> | install.packages command to the error message to instruct users to
> | install the required package.
>
> [...]
>
> | I personally would not want install.packages() to install packages I'm
> | unlikely to actually use.
> |
> | It's also not clear to me how importing rarely used functions causes
> | bloat, but installing all packages for all rarely-used functions does
> | not cause bloat.
>
> Sadly, some people whose advocacy is taken as religous gospel in some
> circles, particularly beginners, advocate pretty much that: treat Suggests:
> as Depends: and install it anyway because, hell, why would one tests.
>
> I regularly run (large) reverse depends checks against some of my more widely
> used packages and run into this all the time.
>
> We (as a community, including CRAN whose gatekeepers I have failed to
> convince about this on on multiple attempts) are doing this wrong.
> "Suggests:" really means optionally, rather than unconditionally.  But it
> would appear that you and I are about to only ones desiring that behaviour.

I thought I understood Joshua's point (and agreed with it), but you also 
seem to be agreeing with him and I don't understand at all what you're 
saying.

What is "this" in your last paragraph, that you have failed to convince 
CRAN gatekeepers about?

Duncan Murdoch