On 26 December 2025 at 18:45, Rafael Laboissière wrote:
| Package: r-cran-car
| Version: 3.1-3-1
| Severity: minor
|
| Dear Maintainer,
|
| The r-cran-car package depends on r-cran-rio. However, the following is
| seen in the DESCRIPTION file:
|
| Imports: abind, Formula, MASS, mgcv, nnet, pbkrtest (>= 0.4-4),
| quantreg, grDevices, utils, stats, graphics, lme4 (>=
| 1.1-27.1), nlme, scales
| Suggests: alr4, boot, coxme, effects, knitr, leaps, lmtest, Matrix,
| MatrixModels, ordinal, plotrix, mvtnorm, rgl (>= 0.111.3), rio,
| sandwich, SparseM, survival, survey
|
| According to the NEWS file, the rio package has been demoted from Imports
| to Suggests in the upstream version 3.0-12:
|
| Changes to Version 3.0-12
|
| o The 'rio` package is now suggested, not required. To use the
| Import() and Export() functions users may need to install rio using
| install.packages("rio")
|
| Please, remove r-cran-rio from Depends.
Will do.
| One more question: would it be reasonable to add a Suggests field to
| debian/control that reflects the Suggests field in DESCRIPTION? At least,
| this is what dh-make-R does when building a package for car from scratch.
It is a catch and mouse game I have found to be tedious in the long
run. Packages 'car' and 'Rcmdr', both by the late John Fox who passed away
recently, had a tendency to add new dependencies and suggestions. I emailed a
few times with John about this, and at some points the penny drops that
adding a new package to Debian is not "that easy" -- among my 100+ packages
are easily ten or more added simply because his packages extended their
dependencies and we needed it.
It is much simpler to set up a build process (outside of Debian proper) that
just builds all CRAN packages. I have done so with r2u [1] which, for some
technical reasons, started at / is at Ubuntu. It has shipped over 60 million
binaries. There is a demand for this: _reliably_ provide all of CRAN, rather
than a subset of 1200 or 1300 as we do.
Cheers, Dirk
[1] https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u/
--
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | [email protected]
