The Suggests field in a DESCRIPTION file.

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Rolf Turner
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 5:17 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] 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.

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