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
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