[R-pkg-devel] How to declare Bioconductor Dependencies in the Description File of my R Package

[Ivan Krylov]

В Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:29:51 +0000
"Ruff, Sergej" <Sergej.Ruff using tiho-hannover.de> пишет:

> The problem is that a local installation of my package (via USB-stick
> for example) can´t install the dependencies from CRAN.
> 
> The package works perfectly fine, if the dependencies are
> preinstalled.

This is a similar, but different problem. It is indeed solved by having
your package with its dependencies in a repository.

> So I thought all dependencies would install automatically from CRAN?

The user is allowed to install your package with dependencies = NA
(which means not installing packages listed under Suggests). The
Depends, Imports and LinkingTo will be installed, but not Suggests. The
user will have to pass dependencies = TRUE in order to install the
packages listed under Suggests.

Your package is required to work (in particular, run the examples and
vignettes and pass the tests without errors) without having the
suggested packages installed:
<https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Suggested-packages>.
You can check whether limma can be loaded and raise an error otherwise,
but your tests, examples and vignettes shouldn't raise errors or
otherwise crash. This is checked by CRAN here:
https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/noSuggests/README.txt

If your package can't be meaningfully used without limma, do list it as
a strong dependency.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan