On 13-12-07 12:19 PM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
I don't know about this particular case, but in general it makes sense
to rely on a data package. E.g. I am creating a package that does
Bayesian inference for a particular problem, potentially relying on
prior knowledge. I think it makes sense to put the data that is used
to calculate the prior into another package, because it will be larger
than the code, and it does not change that often.

Gabor

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert...@gmail.com> wrote:
Would "Suggests" not work in this situation? I don't understand why you
would need Depends. In what sense do you rely on the data only package?


HW> Because I want someone who downloads the package to be able to run
HW> the examples without having to take additional action.
HW>
HW> Hadley

I went through this myself, including thinking it was a nuisance for users to need to attach other packages to run examples. In the end I decided it is not so bad to be explicit about what package the example data comes from, so illustrate it in the examples. Users may not always want this data, and other packages that build on yours probably do not want it.

Even in the Bayesian inference case pointed out by Gábor, I am not convinced. It means the prior knowledge base cannot be exchanged for another one. The package would be more general if it allowed the possibility of attaching a different database of prior information. But this is clearly a more important case, since the code probably does not work without some database. (There are a few other situations where something like "RequireOneOf:" would be useful.)

Paul

Paul

On 13-12-06 04:20 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:

Hi all,

What should you do when you rely on a data only package. If you just
"Depend" on it, you get the following from R CMD check:

Package in Depends field not imported from: 'hflights'
    These packages needs to imported from for the case when
    this namespace is loaded but not attached.

But there's nothing in the namespace to import, so adding it to
imports doesn't seem like the right answer.  Is that just a spurious
note?

Hadley


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