On 23 February 2007 at 19:38, hadley wickham wrote:
| ggplot currently requires 13 packages (grid, reshape, RColorBrewer,
| proto, splines, MASS, Hmisc, boot, butler, hexbin, mapproj, quantreg,
| sm). Some of these are absolutely necessary (eg. proto), but most are
| used for one or two specific tasks (eg. boot is only used to get
| plogis, used for logit scales).
|
| Do you think I should make them all "depends" packages, or "suggests"
| packages, and then manually test for package presence before using a
| certain function? What is easier for users?
Rcmdr uses to have hard Depends. Given that I maintained Rcmdr in Debian, I
had to add a lot of additional packages to Debian only to cover Rcmdr's build
requirements.
John later changed that to Suggests
Depends: R (>= 2.1.0), tcltk, grDevices, utils
Suggests: abind, car (>= 1.2-1), effects (>= 1.0-7), foreign, grid,
lattice, lmtest, MASS, mgcv, multcomp (>= 0.991-2), nlme, nnet, relimp,
rgl, RODBC
which he then tests for in Startup.R. I think Graham's rattle does something
similar.
I think you will get confused users either way as it is impossible to please
all the people all the time. Foolprof methods only attract smarter fools.
Hope this helps, Dirk
--
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
-- Thomas A. Edison
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