[R-pkg-devel] Cross-references and dependencies

[Lluís Revilla]

Dear package developers,

I was reading section 2.5 Cross-references of Writing R Extensions and I
found the following sentence.

The last sentence of the  section [1] is:
> Packages referred to by these ‘other forms’ should be declared in the
DESCRIPTION file, in the ‘Depends’, ‘Imports’, ‘Suggests’ or ‘Enhances’
fields.

These "other forms" I understand are those not using a topic for anchoring
(\link[=topic]{text}), but using the package like \link[pkg]{text} or
\link[pkg:topic]{text}.
But my question is how to interpret this "declared in the DESCRIPTION
file". Should all packages be listed as  a direct dependency, or could they
also be on a recursive dependency?

As far as I could tell there is currently no check on R, or repositories
checks, for this and some R documentation files have cross-references to
packages outside their (recursive) dependency tree.
This results in the following error message (on my IDE) when following the
cross-reference: URL '/help/library/<pkg>/help/<topic> not found.

Best,

Lluís

[1]:
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-exts.html#Cross_002dreferences-1

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