From sfalcon at fhcrc.org  Wed Aug 30 17:01:44 2006
From: sfalcon at fhcrc.org (Seth Falcon)
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:01:44 -0700
Subject: [Rd] "Enhances"
In-Reply-To: <17653.33374.71038.862175@basebud.nulle.part> (Dirk
	Eddelbuettel's message of "Wed, 30 Aug 2006 07:19:42 -0500")
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Message-ID: <m23bbe5ktj.fsf@ziti.fhcrc.org>

Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
> Now, while we're at it, Debian also has a field called "Enhances:" and IIRC
> it provides a means to communicate a relationship 'the other way'.  Ie a
> package foo, rather than being 'pulled in' by a package bar via a Depends,
> makes itself available to bar.   That is useful as you can enhance the
> 'graph' structure without a change in the other package.  Maybe that would be
> of use for R too?

Such a field DependsOnMe might be useful in some cases, but one can
compute that using the dependency graph.  One just needs a bit of
code...

[shameless plug]

I have an almost complete package 'pkgDepTools' that provides tools
for computing and analyzing dependency relationships among R packages.

It provides tools for building a graph-based representation of the
dependencies among all packages in a list of CRAN-style package
repositories.  There are also utilities for computing installation
order of a given package.  If the RCurl package is available, an
estimate of the download size required to install a given package and
its dependencies can be obtained.

It should be available in Bioconductor in the next couple of weeks.

Bw,

+ seth




[Rd] "Enhances"
Seth Falcon