New R CMD CHECK Note in R 4.2.0 for Imports field

[dchiu]

A new R CMD CHECK Note was introduced when I upgraded to R 4.2.0, but I could not find in the R changelog what happened. I am getting

❯ checking dependencies in R code ... NOTE
  Namespaces in Imports field not imported from:
    ‘DBI’ ‘RSQLite’ ‘assertthat’ ‘cli’ ‘dbplyr’ ‘rlang’ ‘stringr’ ‘tidyr’
    All declared Imports should be used.

I am using functions from these packages for the methods of my RC class. Previously, in R 4.1.3 this note did not appear. I am a little reluctant to add @import tags for all these packages. What is the current practice now for importing functions for RC methods?

[Gabor]

It is probably because you create the class at install time, and the check does not consider code that runs at install time.

A workaround is to create a dummy function that refers to these packages:

dummy <- function() {
  cli::cli_alert
  stringr::str_replace
  ...
}

Silly, but this satisfies the check.

[dchiu]

Thanks @Gabor I can use this dummy function, just wondering if anyone else has come across this and if there's going to be a long-term solution?

[dchiu]

My dummy hack in R/utils.R:

#' @noRd
dummy <- function() {
  DBI::dbConnect
  RSQLite::dbConnect
  assertthat::assert_that
  cli::cli_alert
  dbplyr::sql
  hash::hash
  rlang::abort
  stringr::str_replace
  tidyr::pivot_longer
}

If anyone has a better solution please let me know!