[R-pkg-devel] How to (conditionally) use an archived package (without Suggests)?

[Marius Hofert]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 1:41 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24/02/2018 7:26 PM, Marius Hofert wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 1:09 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 25 February 2018 at 00:45, Marius Hofert wrote:
>>> | A package 'foo' uses a package 'bar' (in Imports). 'bar' has been
>>> | archived and the maintainer of 'foo' was asked to fix the dependency
>>> | on 'bar' according to WRE 1.1.3.1.
>>> |
>>> | Working with 'bar::' everywhere (and requireNamespace("bar", quietly =
>>> | TRUE)), as well as moving 'bar' from Imports to Suggests seems to work
>>> | but is not accepted on submission. Removing 'bar' also from Suggests
>>> | leads to
>>> |
>>> | '::' or ':::' import not declared from: ‘bar’
>>> | 'loadNamespace' or 'requireNamespace' call not declared from: ‘bar’
>>> |
>>> | Does this mean it is not possible to use 'bar' anymore in 'foo'?
>>>
>>> Your title says "conditionally".
>>>
>>> Does your code actually behave conditionally, ie does foo check if bar is
>>> available, and only use its code if it is?
>>
>> Hi Dirk,
>>
>> nice to hear from you and thanks for helping!
>>
>> Yes, 'foo' essentially has one main function with an argument 'method
>> = c("b", "ba", "bar")'. If the user chooses to call the function with
>> method = "bar", then it is checked whether "bar" is installed (as
>> described in WRE) and an error is thrown if not.
>
> Don't throw an error, work around it.

Hi,

the 'workaround' is the error: to tell the user not to use it (but one
of the other available methods).

To be more precise: 'bar' is the package 'loon' for dynamic graphics
(and 'foo' is 'zenplots'). If that's not installed, the user can
choose to work with the other (non-dynamic) graphics packages. If a
user actively chooses to do the plotting with loon but doesn't have
loon installed, the error is a logical consequence.

> If you have no alternative code,
> then don't test the "bar" code unless "bar" is installed.

The main plotting function in zenplots uses:

    if(pkg == "loon" && !requireNamespace("loon", quietly = TRUE))
        stop("Package 'loon' is not available.")

... and if it's installed, it will call various further functions from
loon (now all used via "loon::..."). There are no tests or examples
that fail, everything works -- it's just that the use of "::"
generates the warning I mentioned which is (most likely) unacceptable
for upload to CRAN.

>
> The basic idea is that your package should pass tests without errors
> even if "bar" is not available.

It does -- except for the 'warning':

'::' or ':::' import not declared from: ‘bar’
'loadNamespace' or 'requireNamespace' call not declared from: ‘bar’

>
> I think Dirk is wrong saying that "bar" has to be available; CRAN isn't
> going to go looking for it.  But they do want your package to pass all
> tests even if none of the Suggests packages is available.

'loon' is not in Suggests. It originally was in 'Imports', then I put
it to 'Suggests', but when I submitted, Uwe wrote:

But you still have
Suggests: loon,
Please fix and resubmit.

... so it shouldn't appear in 'Suggests' either (I guess). That's why
I also removed it from Suggests, but then (because of the above
warning), I can't submit either.

Not sure how to solve this (... and thought that others might have a
similar problem with archived packages -- thus this post).

Cheers,
Marius

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>>
>>>
>>> One additional difficulty may be that even for Suggests, it still has to be
>>> accessible "somewhere" .
>>
>> The full story is this: 'bar' has been archived because 'problems were
>> not corrected despite reminders'. 'bar' is mainly developed on github
>> and is probably easy to fix, but I also couldn't reach the maintainer
>> and I thought it's better to 'decrease' the dependency on 'bar' as
>> much as possible. 'bar' is actually quite intrusive to install/use
>> (requires R to be configured with tcltk). However, 'bar' provides some
>> nice features which the other methods ("b", "ba") don't have -- would
>> be a pity to completely remove 'bar' from 'foo'.
>>
>> So 'bar' is on github (and thus could be installed from there + 'foo'
>> could make use of 'bar' conditionally... just don't know how to submit
>> 'foo' to CRAN because of the warning)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> M
>>
>>
>>
>>> And "archived" is not.  You could just move bar
>>> onto a drat repo you set yp -- we have done the same for data packages and
>>> have a R Journal paper describing it:
>>>
>>>     https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2017/RJ-2017-026/index.html
>>>
>>> Hth, Dirk
>>>
>>> --
>>> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
>>
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