If it useful for your own development, we can speed this transition up.

This close to release, that makes sense, and I'm happy you brought this

David, Thanks for your feedback and ideas, and let me address your points. Just to be clear to list members who are likely using Zelig4, these points are with the development version of Zelig5. *"12 packages listed under Depends"* As you probably know, checking for dependency length is now a Check on the CRAN list, so certainly we would move the Dependency list to an Import list before the package is ready to send to CRAN, or even before we release as Beta. If it useful for your own development, we can speed this transition up. While still under development, however, I'm sure you can appreciate it is sometimes useful to have fuller access to the packages Zelig is bridging to while building those bridges, and thus attaching the package ("Depends") can be useful during development. Perhaps we should move to Imports for the available codebase on GitHub while using Depends for a little while longer locally. This close to release, that makes sense, and I'm happy you brought this up. *"But because MASS is listed before dplyr in Depends in Zelig, there is no way (if you have Zelig loaded) to have "select" refer to the function in dplyr."* If I understand your comment, the load order in R works in the opposite direction than in your example (dplyr::select() here would instead replace MASS::select() ). When you say "there is no way", obviously the "::" operator is excellent for disambiguation with any such conflict. (Here is a Wickham post on this subject http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/namespace.html ). However, more generally, if it is now useful for us to switch to Imports, we can do this to aid those trialing the Zelig5. *"including both plyr and dplyr in Depends"* On the plyr/dplyr issue, there are small differences between how the "mutate" works in these packages, and at present we are using plyr's mutate for one issue, while working to move everything shortly to dplyr. Again, a hallmark of a package in development. I'm excited there are users beginning to investigate Zelig5, even before we think of it as released. I'm very interested to hear any other issues or feedback you have. Best, James -- James Honaker, Senior Research Scientist //// Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University ------------------------------ *From:* zelig-bounces(a)lists.gking.harvard.edu [ zelig-bounces(a)lists.gking.harvard.edu] on behalf of David Kane [ dave.kane(a)gmail.com] *Sent:* Tuesday, November 04, 2014 7:43 AM *To:* zelig(a)lists.gking.harvard.edu *Subject:* [zelig] Zelig ought to import specific functions rather than Depend on 12 packages The current version of the DESCRIPTION file for Zelig has 12 packages listed under Depends. Writing R Extensions explains why this is a bad idea. http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Package-Depende… Key passage: "Field ‘Depends’ should nowadays be used rarely, only for packages which are intended to be put on the search path to make their facilities available to the end user (and not to the package itself): for example it makes sense that a user of package *latticeExtra* <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=latticeExtra> would want the functions of package *lattice* <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lattice> made available. Almost always packages mentioned in ‘Depends’ should also be imported from in the NAMESPACE file: this ensures that any needed parts of those packages are available when some other package imports the current package." This is especially true for Zelig because of naming conflicts between some of the packages in Depends. For me (and others?) the key issue involves dplyr and MASS. Both have a function called "select." That function is critically important to any user of dplyr. (I don't think it matters much to users of MASS.) But because MASS is listed before dplyr in Depends in Zelig, there is no way (if you have Zelig loaded) to have "select" refer to the function in dplyr. Also, including both plyr and dplyr in Depends seems very sloppy. The solution (and current best practice in R) is to not use Depends so much, if at all, and to only import functions from a package like MASS that you actually need. Thanks.