Using miniCRAN to identify package dependencies
Andrie de Vries
March 28, 2024
Source:vignettes/miniCRAN-dependency-graph.rmd
miniCRAN-dependency-graph.rmd
The miniCRAN
package exposes two functions that provide
information about dependencies:
The function
pkgDep()
returns a character vector with the names of dependencies. Internally,pkgDep()
is a wrapper aroundtools::package_dependencies()
, a base R function that, well, tells you about package dependencies. MypkgDep()
function is in one way a convenience, but more importantly it sets different defaults (more about this later).The function
makeDepGraph()
creates a graph representation of the dependencies.
The package chron
neatly illustrates the different roles
of Imports, Suggests and Enhances:
chron
Imports the base packages graphics and stats. This means thatchron
internally makes use of graphics and stats and will always load these packages.chron
Suggests the packages scales and ggplot2. This means thatchron
uses some functions from these packages in examples or in its vignettes. However, these functions are not necessary to usechron
chron
Enhances the packagezoo
, meaning that it adds something tozoo
packages. These enhancements are made available to you if you havezoo
installed.
A worked example using the package chron
The function pkgDep()
exposes not only these
dependencies, but also all recursive dependencies. In other words, it
answers the question which packages need to be installed to satisfy all
dependencies of dependencies.
This means that the algorithm is as follows:
- First retrieve a list of
Suggests
andEnhances
, using a non-recursive dependency search - Next, perform a recursive search for all
Imports
,Depends
andLinkingTo
The resulting list of packages should then contain the complete list necessary to satisfy all dependencies. In code:
tags <- "chron"
pkgDep(tags, availPkgs = cranJuly2014)
## [1] "chron" "RColorBrewer" "dichromat" "munsell" "plyr"
## [6] "labeling" "colorspace" "Rcpp" "digest" "gtable"
## [11] "reshape2" "scales" "proto" "MASS" "stringr"
## [16] "ggplot2"
To create an igraph plot of the dependencies, use the function
makeDepGraph()
and plot the results:
dg <- makeDepGraph(tags, enhances = TRUE, availPkgs = cranJuly2014)
set.seed(1)
plot(dg, legendPosition = c(-1, 1), vertex.size = 20)
Note how the dependencies expand to zoo
(enhanced),
scales
and ggplot
(suggested) and then
recursively from there to get all the Imports
and
LinkingTo
dependencies.
An example with multiple input packages
As a final example, create a dependency graph of seven very popular R packages:
tags <- c("ggplot2", "data.table", "plyr", "knitr", "shiny", "xts", "lattice")
pkgDep(tags, suggests = TRUE, enhances = FALSE, availPkgs = cranJuly2014)
## [1] "ggplot2" "data.table" "plyr" "knitr" "shiny"
## [6] "xts" "lattice" "digest" "gtable" "reshape2"
## [11] "scales" "proto" "MASS" "Rcpp" "stringr"
## [16] "RColorBrewer" "dichromat" "munsell" "labeling" "colorspace"
## [21] "evaluate" "formatR" "highr" "markdown" "mime"
## [26] "httpuv" "caTools" "RJSONIO" "xtable" "htmltools"
## [31] "bitops" "zoo" "SparseM" "survival" "Formula"
## [36] "latticeExtra" "cluster" "maps" "sp" "foreign"
## [41] "mvtnorm" "TH.data" "sandwich" "nlme" "Matrix"
## [46] "bit" "codetools" "iterators" "timeDate" "quadprog"
## [51] "Hmisc" "BH" "quantreg" "mapproj" "hexbin"
## [56] "maptools" "multcomp" "testthat" "mgcv" "chron"
## [61] "reshape" "fastmatch" "bit64" "abind" "foreach"
## [66] "doMC" "itertools" "testit" "rgl" "XML"
## [71] "RCurl" "Cairo" "timeSeries" "tseries" "its"
## [76] "fts" "tis" "KernSmooth"
dg <- makeDepGraph(tags, enhances = TRUE, availPkgs = cranJuly2014)
set.seed(1)
plot(dg, legendPosition = c(-1, -1), vertex.size = 10, cex = 0.7)