[Bioc-devel] Why can't NAMESPACE be a strict subset of DESCRIPTION Imports?

From: "Martin Morgan" <martin.morgan at roswellpark.org>
To: "McDavid, Andrew" <Andrew_Mcdavid at urmc.rochester.edu>, "bioc-devel" <bioc-devel at r-project.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 4, 2016 2:09:27 PM
Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] Why can't NAMESPACE be a strict subset of DESCRIPTION Imports?

On 10/04/2016 05:07 PM, McDavid, Andrew wrote:

BiocCheck throws a warning when a package is listed as Imports: in DESCRIPTION
but not used in the NAMESPACE.  This may happen when a developer uses the fully
qualified names of objects within a package.  I am unclear as to the rationale
for this warning.

agree it's wrong. can you point to an example? Martin

Per Hadley:

It's common for packages to be listed in Imports in DESCRIPTION, but not in
NAMESPACE. In fact, this is what I recommend: list the package in DESCRIPTION
so that it's installed, then always refer to it explicitly with pkg::fun().
Unless there is a strong reason not to, it's better to be explicit. It's a
little more work to write, but a lot easier to read when you come back to the
code in the future.

Per R extensions:

If a package only needs a few objects from another package it can use a fully
qualified variable reference in the code instead of a formal import. A fully
qualified reference to the function f in package foo is of the form foo::f.

-Andrew


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