The Suggests field in a DESCRIPTION file.

I am building a package which contains a function from which I wish to 
call the fortune() function from the fortunes package --- if that 
package is available.

I have place the line

    Suggests: fortunes

in the DESCRIPTION file.

In my code for the function that I am writing (let's call it "foo")
I put

fortOK <- requireNamespace(fortunes,quietly=TRUE)
        if(fortOK) {
            fortunes::fortune()
        }

thinking that I was following all of the prescriptions in "Writing R 
Extensions".  Yet when I do R CMD check on the package I get

* checking R code for possible problems ... NOTE
foo: no visible binding for global variable ?fortunes?
Undefined global functions or variables:
  fortunes

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any insight.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

P. S.  I tried putting an "imports(fortunes)" in the NAMESPACE file, but 
this just made matters worse:

* checking package dependencies ... ERROR
Namespace dependency not required: ?fortunes?

Huh?  What on earth is this actually saying?  I cannot parse this error 
message.

R. T.

Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276