From h.wickham at gmail.com  Thu Aug 28 14:52:21 2014
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (Hadley Wickham)
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 07:52:21 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Re R CMD check checking in development version of R
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>>> I'd say: Depends is a historical artefact from ye old days before
>>> package namespaces. Apart from depending on a specific version of R,
>>> you should basically never use depends.  (The one exception is, as
>>> mentioned in R-exts, if you're writing something like latticeExtras
>>> that doesn't make sense unless lattice is already loaded).
>>
>> Keeping this nuance in mind when when discussing Depends vs Imports is
>> important so as to not suggest that there isn't any reason to use Depends
>> any longer.
>
> A common case in Bioconductor is that a package defines a class and methods
> intended for the user; this requires the package to be on the search path
> (else the user wouldn't be able to do anything with the returned object). A
> class and supporting methods can represent significant infrastructure, so
> that it makes sense to separate these in distinct packages. It is not
> uncommon to find 3-5 or more packages in the Depends: field of derived
> packages for this reason.

For that scenario, is it reasonable to say that every package in
depends must also be in imports?

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] Re R CMD check checking in development version of R
Hadley Wickham