tools:: extracting pkg dependencies from DCF
Hi Jan and Jan, Can you explain a little more what exactly you want the non-recursive, non-version aware dependencies from an individual package for? Either way package_dependencies will do this for you* with a little "aggressive convincing". It wants output from available.packages, but who really cares what it wants? It's a function and we are people :)
library(tools)
db <- read.dcf("~/gabe/checkedout/rtables_clean/DESCRIPTION")
package_dependencies("rtables", db, which = intersect(c("Depends",
"Suggests", "Imports", "LinkingTo"), colnames(db)))
$rtables
[1] "methods" "magrittr" "formatters" "dplyr" "tibble"
[6] "tidyr" "testthat" "xml2" "knitr" "rmarkdown"
[11] "flextable" "officer" "stats" "htmltools" "grid"
The only gotcha that I see immediately is that "LinkingTo" isn't always
there (whereas it is with real output from available.packages). If you know
your package doesn't have that (or that it does) at call time , this
becomes a one-liner:
package_dependencies("rtables", db =
read.dcf("~/gabe/checkedout/rtables_clean/DESCRIPTION"), which =
c("Depends", "Suggests", "Imports"))
$rtables
[1] "methods" "magrittr" "formatters" "dplyr" "tibble"
[6] "tidyr" "testthat" "xml2" "knitr" "rmarkdown"
[11] "flextable" "officer" "stats" "htmltools" "grid"
You can also trick it a slightly different way by giving it what it
actually wants
tdir <- tempdir()
file.copy("~/gabe/checkedout/rtables_clean/DESCRIPTION", file.path(tdir,
"PACKAGES")) [1] TRUE
avl <- available.packages(paste0("file://", tdir))
library(tools)
package_dependencies("rtables", avl)
$rtables [1] "methods" "magrittr" "formatters" "stats" "htmltools" [6] "grid"
package_dependencies("rtables", avl, which = "all")
$rtables [1] "methods" "magrittr" "formatters" "stats" "htmltools" [6] "grid" "dplyr" "tibble" "tidyr" "testthat" [11] "xml2" "knitr" "rmarkdown" "flextable" "officer" So the only real benefits I see that we'd be picking up here is automatic filtering by priority, and automatic extraction of the package name from the DESCRIPTION file. I'm not sure either of those warrant a new exported function that R-core has to maintain forever. Best, ~G * I haven't tested this across all OSes, but I dont' know of any reason it wouldn't work generally.
On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 2:33 PM Jan Gorecki <j.gorecki at wit.edu.pl> wrote:
Hello Jan, Thanks for confirming about many packages reinventing this missing functionality. packages.dcf was not meant handle versions. It just extracts names of dependencies... Yes, such a simple thing, yet missing in base R. Versions of packages can be controlled when setting up R pkgs repo. This is how I used to handle it. Making a CRAN subset mirror of fixed version pkgs. BTW. function for that is also included in mentioned branch. I am just not proposing it, to increase the chance of having at least this simple, missing, functionality merged. Best Jan On Fri, Oct 14, 2022, 15:14 Jan Net?k <netikja at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Jan, I have seen many packages that implemented dependencies "extraction" on their own for internal purposes and today I was doing exactly that for mine. It's not a big deal using read.dcf on DESCRIPTION. It was
sufficient
for me, but I had to take care of some \n chars (the overall returned
value
has some rough edges, in my opinion). However, the function from the
branch
seems to not care about version requirements, which are crucial for me. Maybe that is something to reconsider before merging. Best, Jan p? 14. 10. 2022 v 2:27 odes?latel Jan Gorecki <j.gorecki at wit.edu.pl> napsal:
Dear R devs, I would like to raise a request for a simple helper function. Utility function to extract package dependencies from DESCRIPTION file. I do think that tools package is better place, for such a fundamental functionality, than community packages. tools pkg seems perfect fit (having already great function write_PACKAGES). Functionality I am asking for is already in R svn repository since 2016, in a branch tools4pkgs. Function is called 'packages.dcf'. Another one 'repos.dcf' would be a good functional complementary to it. Those two simple helper functions really makes it easier for
organizations
to glue together usage of their own R packages repos and CRAN repo in a smooth way. That could possibly help to offload CRAN from new
submissions.
gh mirror link for easy preview:
Regards
Jan Gorecki
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