Rcmdr package dependencies
John Fox wrote:
Dear Seth,
-----Original Message----- From: Seth Falcon [mailto:seth at userprimary.net] Sent: September-22-09 5:13 PM To: Uwe Ligges Cc: John Fox; r-devel at r-project.org Subject: Re: [Rd] Rcmdr package dependencies * On 2009-09-22 at 20:16 +0200 Uwe Ligges wrote:
no, this is not possible. Consider your package A (or Rcmdr) suggests B that suggests C. Then A::foo uses the function B::bar which only works if C::dep is present. B works essentially without C but it requires C just to make bar work. Then this means your A::foo won't work if C is not installed and you won't get it with the setup mentioned above. In summary, I fear what you want might work well *now* (by chance), but it does not work in general.
In general, one would expect a given package to function when its
suggested packages are not available. As such, it seems quite
reasonable to install a package, its Depends, Imports, and Suggests,
but not install Suggests recursively.
I think you could achieve such an installation using two calls to
install.packages:
install.packages("Rcmdr")
Rcmdr.Suggests <- strsplit(packageDescription("Rcmdr")$Suggests,
",\\s?")[[1]]
## need extra cleanup since packageDescription("blah")$Suggests
## Returns package names with versions as strings
wantPkgs <- sub("^([^ ]+).*", "\\1", Rcmdr.Suggests)
Nice suggestion, indeed! I think there is some code in package "tools" that help to resolve these issues even more convenient: wantPkgs <- package.dependencies(available.packages()["Rcmdr",], depLevel = "Suggests")[["Rcmdr"]][,1] so you do not need to have Rcmdr already installed and can rely on the R internal code that can strip all that version information. Best wishes, Uwe
havePkgs <- installed.packages()[, "Package"] wantPkgs <- wantPkgs[!(wantPkgs %in% havePkgs)] install.packages(wantPkgs)
The Rcmdr maintains a list of its dependencies, so it already does something similar to this, but I like your version better because it queries the Description file directly. I can't really expect a user to issue a command like this, so I suppose that the best solution is, as at present, to have the Rcmdr package do the checking and installation at start-up but to install with dep=FALSE. Thanks, John
+ seth -- Seth Falcon | @sfalcon | http://userprimary.net/user