[Bioc-devel] Depending vs. Importing?
Without going to your particular example, the main difference as I see it, is that developers using import can still make the packages usable in case a dependency is broken. Suppose your package is intended for some complex analysis (for which it does not need anything) and can additionally produce some fancy graphical output of the analysis if it loads a dependency. Now if this dependency is broken (missing, cannot be compiled etc) - with depends your package will fail to install; with import the package developer could have tested for the result and implemented some simple plots if the dependency is broken - but the package would still work for the analysis. If however, the package fails to work completely when it cannot import something, then such import should go into depends to allow for the error during the installation time. Generally, you do not want to make a package totally non-functional if 1 of 10 dependencies fails, therefore it is reasonable to use import for lesser important features of the package. Cheers, Oleg
Byron Ellis wrote:
Is there any particular reason Imports and different from Dependencies? I may be missing something, but importing would seem to imply a dependence relationship which doesn't appear to be honored. rflowcyt (not to pick on it, it just happened to be the package I tried to load) for example imports but does not depend on prada. --- Byron Ellis (ellis at stat.harvard.edu) "Oook" -- The Librarian
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Dr. Oleg Sklyar European Bioinformatics Institute Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton Cambridge CB10 1SD England Tel +44-1223-494466 Fax +44-1223-494468 email osklyar at ebi.ac.uk