Dependencies

[privefl]

As catboost and lightgbm are not CRAN packages, you should probably move them to Suggests dependencies and add some requireNamespace (cf. http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/description.html).

[nanxstats]

Interesting proposal. I think by definition they should be in Imports instead of Suggests:

The ‘Suggests’ field... lists packages that are not necessarily needed. This includes packages used only in examples, tests or vignettes..., and packages loaded in the body of functions.

The only viable reason for moving them into Suggests would be for a CRAN submission - which I have no intentions to do (albeit the better exposure), because compromises are required (removing namespace imports), plus it won't make the dependency installation any easier.

I will surely reconsider this if lightgbm and catboost made their way to CRAN one way.

[privefl]

Basically, remotes::install_github("nanxstats/stackgbm") won't work until I install the three packages.
But if I want to use only XGBoost, this would be much easier to install.

Anyway, your package.

[nanxstats]

That's a good point though - I updated the installation guide dd0da95 to make the order of things clearer. Thanks for the input!

[nanxstats]

Update: With the help of rlang, I was able to create some simple wrappers for calling the functions in these packages without making them hard dependencies. xgboost and lightgbm are moved to Suggests (don't have to but since they are both on CRAN), with catboost becoming a runtime dependency (not on CRAN as of now).