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. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel