R package namespace issue using data() — data set not found

Question

I've hit an issue trying to import a package (namely, 'robfilter') inside one of my own packages. One of its methods that I am trying to use, adore.filter, is failing at this line:

data(critvals)

With error 'data set 'critvals' not found'.

The function works fine if I load the library via require(robfilter). However, this means that in order to use my custom package which calls adore.filter, I will have to load my own package, and then load robfilter. Not a huge problem but slightly annoying.

I'm not sure if the problem is that there is an extra step I need to do in order to make critvals visible within my package, or if perhaps there is something the package author needed to do (and hasn't done) to add critvals to its package namespace; there is no sign of 'critvals' in the robfilter NAMESPACE file. I haven't encountered this issue before and don't really understand how the use of data() inside a package is supposed to work.

Answer 1

There are two solutions as far as I know:

• Either ask the robfilter Maintainer to put the data needed by robfiler in the internal data file of robfilter. (R/sysdata.rda)
• Or make your package Depends on robfilter

So it works if you put robfilter in the depends section of your description file. But in my case (both are my packages), I was trying to avoid the Depends solution as it loads the imported package and also any other package will need to depend ont its imported package... See my question is quite a duplicate of yours but not in the same context.