‘renv’ already supports box::use() declarations for dependency discovery via static analysis.
However, this misses all package dependencies declared inside modules that are imported via box::use(), in particular non-local modules (local modules would presumably be searched by ‘renv’ anyway). Adding support for the discovery of transitive package dependencies declared inside modules used by a project to ‘renv’ should be feasible, but would require more complex static analysis, in combination with a reimplementation of the module finding algorithm used by ‘box’.
A better solution would be for ‘box’ to expose supporting infrastructure that could be invoked by ‘renv’. This is kind of “safe”, since a ‘renv’ project that uses ‘box’ presumably has ‘box’ installed anyway, so ‘renv’ could soft-depend on it (via Enhances; or it might not even need that?).
Please describe your feature request
‘renv’ already supports
box::use()declarations for dependency discovery via static analysis.However, this misses all package dependencies declared inside modules that are imported via
box::use(), in particular non-local modules (local modules would presumably be searched by ‘renv’ anyway). Adding support for the discovery of transitive package dependencies declared inside modules used by a project to ‘renv’ should be feasible, but would require more complex static analysis, in combination with a reimplementation of the module finding algorithm used by ‘box’.A better solution would be for ‘box’ to expose supporting infrastructure that could be invoked by ‘renv’. This is kind of “safe”, since a ‘renv’ project that uses ‘box’ presumably has ‘box’ installed anyway, so ‘renv’ could soft-depend on it (via
Enhances; or it might not even need that?).