Automatically populate description imports about roxygen HOT 3 CLOSED

I brought this up via email: but, is Depends or Suggests, &c. more appropriate? Seems like we might need a mechanism for specifying this, unless e.g. Depends is implicit in @imports.

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Actually, it seems that entries in @imports would must-often populate the Imports: field of DESCRIPTION, since those are packages that have a namespace.

The Depends: dependencies might need to be specified separately with an @Depends or equivalent. Part of the reason for this, IMHO, is that the Imports:/Depends: decision is contingent on whether that package has an appropriately-developed namespace, and also whether it is feasible/wise to have them "fully-loaded" in the global-environment. Since this is a tricky decision, and not necessarily based on the code within your own package, it seems the user will need to specify explicitly in some way.

@depends is sortof in the style of the require(pkgname) approach, and seems to fit with the rest of roxygen. I don't think this would interfere with the existing @imports / @importsFrom / etc. setup, which presumably would populate the Imports: field in a similar way that they populate the NAMESPACE file.

I just noticed it is possible (if a package has a namespace) to have it listed as a Depends: dependency in DESCRIPTION, but also imported with import(pkgname) in the NAMESPACE. Is this a conflict or redundant? If so, I need to change it in that package, but also a good example in favor of adding this feature (and checks) to roxygen.

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I now think this is a bad idea - it's better to do the opposite and use information in DESCRIPTION to automatically populate NAMESPACE. These days you should very rarely being using depends.

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