Dear All, before its latest version my package had 'Imports: Matrix' in its DESCRIPTION file, but it did not import anything in NAMESPACE. Rather, some functions explicitly loaded Matrix, as they needed. The reason for this was that importing Matrix is really slow, and only very few igraph functions need it. (I guess Matrix is slow because of the many registered names, but that is another question.)
# Empty session: ~$ time Rscript -e 'ls()' > /dev/null real 0m0.251s user 0m0.196s sys 0m0.049s # Without importing from Matrix: ~$ time Rscript -e 'library(igraph); ls()' > /dev/null Loading required package: methods real 0m0.419s user 0m0.363s sys 0m0.049s # Adding importFrom(Matrix, sparseMatrix) to NAMESPACE: ~$ time Rscript -e 'library(igraph); ls()' > /dev/null Loading required package: methods real 0m2.963s user 0m2.844s sys 0m0.115s This solution was fine with me, especially because other packages depending on igraph and using Matrix through igraph worked fine on the CRAN build servers, as igraph brought Matrix with it. (The build servers don't have recommended packages like Matrix available by default.) Recently, R CMD check does not allow me to list Matrix at Imports without importing something from it. This is understandable, because it is an inconsistency after all, but caused some headache for me. A 3s loading time for a package is IMHO much longer than ideal, especially that loading R itself is ten times faster. So I definitely don't want to import from Matrix right now. The solution I settled with was to include Matrix in 'Suggests', and the load it selectively, as before. Now some packages depending on igraph are failing on the CRAN build servers, which don't have Matrix installed for these packages. (Luckily they are probably not failing for users, because most users do have the recommended packages.) In summary, it would be great to speed up imports. Another solution would be some mechanism that allows me to import from a package as needed, not at the package loading time. Something like a delayed importFrom(). Just wanted to bring up this issue. Best, Gabor ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
