directives to explicitely exclude objects from import into namespaces

Hi,

recently R CMD check --as-cran has noticed some more issues with
package namespace imports with the recommended remedy to
use importFrom() and friends.

In my case, there was only a conflict restricted to some few imports,
while I would prefer to still import all the non-conflicting objects,
methods, and classes of the respective package namespace.

So would it be possible to have some new directives along the lines

import(<pkg>) ## importing the whole namespace of <pkg> in a first step
notimportFrom(<pkg>, <obj1>, <obj2>,....)
            ##  exclude <obj1>, <obj2>, ... again from the previous namespace import
            ## and, similarly,
notimportMethodsFrom(<pkg>, <meth1>, <meth2>,....)
notimportClassesFrom(<pkg>, <cls1>, <cls2>,....)

in the NAMESPACE file?

Otherwise the list of object, methods, classes to be explicitely imported
(in my case) got very long (and hence hard to maintain) -- much longer
than the list of items to be excluded from an import.

Or have I overseen some obvious, easier way to achieve this?

Best regards, Peter

I also second Peter's proposal. I think that it is particularly helpful to
save time for maintainers of packages that were developed a longer time ago.
When writing new packages, it is relatively easy to keep track of which
functions from which packages need to be imported; when maintaining older
code, working this out can be a lot of work.

Best, Ulrike



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