I have an issue with a circular package dependence that prevents building/checking, and I seek advice on breaking the circle so the packages can pass the build-check tests that are required for CRAN submission.
The package pair I'm working with is slow to build, but my tests suggest the issue may be general, and so I will explain it in general terms. Suppose there are two packages: 1. Foo, a package that defines some data types with S4 classes. 2. Foodata, a package that provides such datasets, for use by Foo. With this setup, it seems reasonable that Foo "depends" on Foodata, so the data can be used in Foo and its documentation. Since the data within Foodata are S4 classes as defined in Foo, an attempt to build-check Foodata will produce an error unless Foo is present. But Foo cannot be built unless Foodata exists, since it depends on it. Thus neither Foo nor Foodata can be built and checked. One solution would be to wrap the Foo documentation examples (and relevant Foo code) in require() blocks, and to make Foo "suggest" Foodata, not "depend upon it. My question is whether this is the recommended practice, or the common practice. Thanks in advance to anyone who wishes to offer hints. PS. The problem arose from an attempt to reduce CRAN load by extracting the datasets that had been contained within a previous version of Foo. PPS. my (slow-building) packages are on github and I can supply details if needed. Dan E. Kelley Professor, Oceanography Department Dalhousie University, Canada dan.kel...@dal.ca<mailto:dan.kel...@dal.ca> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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