From deepayan at stat.wisc.edu  Thu Aug 12 18:24:00 2004
From: deepayan at stat.wisc.edu (Deepayan Sarkar)
Date: Thu Aug 12 18:24:22 2004
Subject: [Rd] The Depends: field of a package is now used by library()
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408121648220.20766-100000@gannet.stats>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408121648220.20766-100000@gannet.stats>
Message-ID: <200408121124.00119.deepayan@stat.wisc.edu>

On Thursday 12 August 2004 10:55, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> I can't think of any other example of one package only needing the
> namespace of another (contributed) package.

That's probably because few packages have namespaces yet. Another 
example is nlme which imports lattice, but that's still within 
recommended packages. In the long run, hopefully more packages will 
start using namespaces when appropriate, so this might become more 
relevant.

The only issue I see here is a way to mention namespace requirements in 
DESCRIPTION (which could have been done with Depends thus far because 
it didn't actually do anything else, even though though the intent has 
always been there).

Imported packages are still dependencies in the sense that a package has 
to be available for it's namespace to be usable, so leaving them out of 
Depends: feels slightly weird, but I can live with it.

Deepayan


[Rd] The Depends: field of a package is now used by library()
Deepayan Sarkar