The Depends: field of a package is now used by library()
On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, A.J. Rossini wrote:
Wolfgang Huber <w.huber@dkfz-heidelberg.de> writes:
On Thursday 12 August 2004 07:34, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
In R-devel, the Depends: field in the DESCRIPTION file is now used by library() to load the named packages before the current package, and also to set up the environment to save images and prepare for lazy loading.
Are circular dependencies allowed? Or do they need to be broken, e.g. by replacing one of the edges in a loop by a "suggests"?
Argh -- BioC has something close to that for builds. The release folks will have to explore that issue!
If all the packages were using saved images, nothing has changed, for the Depends: packages are the ones needed to save the image. (The rest are Suggests:.) And if a package is not using a saved image then the Depends: are not needed to build it. You can probably break this by building a package with --no-save and then building it later with --save.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595