[Bioc-devel] best practice: dependencies of dependencies / no visible global function definition
I'm surely not the first asking this question. But as I did not find a clear answer to that (e.g. in the 'Writing R extensions' manual or in the diverse posts on this), I risk asking it again. As an example: I'm dealing a lot with ExpressionSets (from Biobase) and GeneSet[Collection]s (from GSEABase) in my package and they are in- & outputs of my exported functions, so I want them to be available when my package is loaded. Thus, I would tend to put both, 'Biobase' and 'GSEABase', in the 'Depends' field of my DESCRIPTION file and a corresponding 'import' directive in my NAMESPACE file. However, I do know that 'GSEABase' depends on 'Biobase' - so in order to be not redundant and keeping the 'Depends' field as small as possible, I could also remove 'Biobase' from my 'Depends'. Now, everything still works fine (building, installing, and I still got the ExpressionSets when loading my package), however R CMD CHECK now *notes* on many occasions: no visible global function definition for ?pData? no visible global function definition for ?exprs? no visible global function definition for ?fData? ... Ok, these are NOTES, but I assume they are there for a reason. So, I wonder what a developer's best practice is on that - ignoring the notes, adding all Biobase/ExpressionSet functionality via imports, or indeed depending on both packages. Best, Ludwig
Dipl.-Bioinf. Ludwig Geistlinger Lehr- und Forschungseinheit f?r Bioinformatik Institut f?r Informatik Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t M?nchen Amalienstrasse 17, 2. Stock, B?ro A201 80333 M?nchen Tel.: 089-2180-4067 eMail: Ludwig.Geistlinger at bio.ifi.lmu.de