Dear R community, I am creating my own package which uses functions from other packages. After reading several books/help pages I now would do the following to safely use some functions from other packages: 1. list them in Imports: (DESCRIPTION file) 2. put importFrom(packagename, functionname1, functionname2) in NAMESPACE Apparently this now also works without loading the external package with require() or library() inside the function that uses the imported functions. Is this the recommended way to do this (even if there may be several ways...)? Is it save to remove all the library() and require() calls? Thanks a lot Jannis
using functions from other packages in own package
2 messages · Jannis, Brian Ripley
On 20/08/2013 15:51, Jannis wrote:
Dear R community, I am creating my own package which uses functions from other packages. After reading several books/help pages I now would do the following to safely use some functions from other packages: 1. list them in Imports: (DESCRIPTION file) 2. put importFrom(packagename, functionname1, functionname2) in NAMESPACE Apparently this now also works without loading the external package with require() or library() inside the function that uses the imported functions. Is this the recommended way to do this (even if there may be several ways...)? Is it save to remove all the library() and require() calls?
Yes, and CRAN is encouraging people to move to this model. There is one exception: 'methods' should be in Depends: (and also importFrom what you need). That is because of a bug in 'methods' as to where it looks for its own functions, which is at least partially fixed in R-patched.
Thanks a lot Jannis
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595