Rcmdr package dependencies

Dear Gabor,

I thought of this solution but rejected it, perhaps too hastily, because it
seemed awkward. I suppose, however, that since the Rcmdr package would be
unchanged, a user could choose to install it as at present with
dependencies=TRUE, or alternatively install the RcmdrInstall package and
avoid the recursive installation of suggested packages. Maybe the idea is a
good one after all.

Thank you,
?John

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com]
Sent: September-22-09 2:32 PM
To: John Fox
Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] Rcmdr package dependencies

Create a package called RcmdrInstall, say, with no content and have it
depend on Rcmdr. ?RcmdrInstall would have all packages as dependencies
while Rcmdr would only have the essential packages as dependencies.

Install RcmdrInstall. ?That would also force Rcmdr to be installed.

Now issue:

? ?library(Rcmdr)

as before and the non-essentials won't be loaded.

Thus the only difference between the current procedure and the new
procedure as far as the user is concerned is that they install
RcmdrInstall rather than Rcmdr. ?They load and run Rcmdr in the same
way.

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:15 AM, John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

Dear r-devel members,

My Rcmdr package "depends" on several other packages (tcltk, grDevices,
utils, and car) and "suggests" a number of others (abind, aplpack,
colorspace, effects, foreign, grid, Hmisc, lattice, leaps, lmtest, MASS,
mgcv, multcomp, nlme, nnet, relimp, rgl, and RODBC). The reason for the
distinction is that I don't want all of these packages to load when the
Rcmdr loads; rather, the "suggested" packages are loaded as they're

needed.

But all of the packages -- both those under "depends" and those under
"suggests" -- really are necessary for all of the features of the Rcmdr

to

work. For example, if the "leaps" package is absent, then the "Subset

model

selection" item in the "Models" menu is suppressed.

This arrangement works reasonably well, but it makes it awkward to

install

the Rcmdr. If the user issues the command install.packages("Rcmdr"),

then

the "suggested" packages aren't installed. On the other hand, if the

user

issues the command install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies=TRUE), which

is

what I currently recommend, then "suggested" packages are installed
recursively, causing dozens of packages, most of them actually

unnecessary,

to be installed. This issue has been growing more acute, and at this

point

even with a fast Internet connection it takes quite a while for all of

the

dependencies to download and install.

I wonder whether I've missed something. Is there a way for me to arrange

the

Rcmdr package dependencies so that only the necessary packages (those
currently listed under both "depends" and "suggests" and the packages on
which they "depend") are installed along with the Rcmdr, but the

currently

"suggested" packages aren't loaded when the Rcmdr loads?

Any help would be appreciated.

John

------------------------------
John Fox, Professor
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox