Today I stumbled across requireNamespace() as a suggested approach to managing sprawling dependencies, particularly in packages that are meant to be "core" building blocks in e.g. BioC.
http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/namespace.html My reading (which may be very, very far off) is that when a desirable piece of code is "optional" in the sense of "the user can opt not to install these other 90 packages" but "suggested" in the sense of "it is suggested that the user bite the bullet anyways", a compromise is to Suggest: installation and then fail at runtime with a message from requireNamespace("suggestedPackage") if the suggestion is not heeded. Is this considered good practice? Mulling it over, my initial reaction of "hey, that's cheating!" has given way to "this is a clever way not to overburden users". Am I reading the underlying logic correctly? I can think of numerous applications for this approach in packages I have developed, not the least of which is patching an ancient piece of code that performs a generalized Gamma deconvolution and once required C++ (hence I ended up commenting out the dependency, which broke most Windows users' installation of the entire package). Thanks, --t [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
