From romain.francois at dbmail.com  Mon Sep 28 09:13:28 2009
From: romain.francois at dbmail.com (Romain Francois)
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:13:28 +0200
Subject: [Rd] build time dependency
In-Reply-To: <4ABFAEAE.2030103@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
References: <4ABC8E7C.2060004@dbmail.com>
	<4ABFAEAE.2030103@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
Message-ID: <4AC06218.4010802@dbmail.com>

On 09/27/2009 08:27 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
>
> Romain Francois wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is there such thing as a build time dependency between packages :
>> package B needs package A so that it can build, but once built it
>> lives without it.
>
>
> Do you mean at a) "R CMD build" time or at b) "R CMD INSTALL" time?

I meant R CMD INSTALL (but probably also R CMD build --binary), I need 
to check the code to see where this overlaps.


> For a), you probably do not need to declare it in DESCRIPTION at all
> (untested).
> For b), you need to declare it. I feel uncomfortable to change the
> Depends field between source and binary version of a package. At least,
> it is not documented to work and if it works (have you tested that?), it
> might not work in some future release of R.
> But since you gave at least 2 reasonable examples for a
> INSTALL-time-only dependency, you might want to contribute some patches
> to handle such a thing.

Sure. I'll have a look to add a "InstallDependencies" (or whatever other 
spelling) field along the lines of Depends, but for INSTALL time.

Romain

>
> Best wishes,
> Uwe
>
>
>> For example depending on the ant package to compile java code, or
>> depend on roxygen to roxygenize the code, ...
>>
>> Adding roxygen to Depends works, but then the installed package does
>> not depend on it and therefore loads it for nothing. Maybe I can
>> remove roxygen from the Depends as part of the ./configure[.win] ...
>>
>> Romain
>>

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Romain Francois
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[Rd] build time dependency
Romain Francois