Why is Shiny a dependency of devtools? [closed] - r

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When I install devtools, I get shiny as a dependency.
> install.packages("devtools")
Installing package into ‘/Users/xxx/tmp/xxx/packrat/lib/x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0/3.5.3’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘zeallot’, ‘colorspace’, ‘utf8’, ‘vctrs’,
‘plyr’, ‘labeling’, ‘munsell’, ‘RColorBrewer’, ‘fansi’, ‘pillar’,
‘pkgconfig’, ‘httpuv’, ‘xtable’, ‘sourcetools’, ‘fastmap’, ‘gtable’,
‘reshape2’, ‘scales’, ‘tibble’, ‘viridisLite’, ‘sys’, ‘ini’, ‘backports’,
‘ps’, ‘lazyeval’, ‘shiny’, ‘ggplot2’, ‘later’, ‘askpass’, ‘clipr’,
‘clisymbols’, ‘curl’, ‘fs’, ‘gh’, ‘purrr’, ‘rprojroot’, ‘whisker’, ‘yaml’,
‘processx’, ‘R6’, ‘assertthat’, ‘rex’, ‘htmltools’, ‘htmlwidgets’,
‘magrittr’, ‘crosstalk’, ‘promises’, ‘mime’, ‘openssl’, ‘prettyunits’,
‘xopen’, ‘brew’, ‘commonmark’, ‘Rcpp’, ‘stringi’, ‘stringr’, ‘xml2’,
‘evaluate’, ‘praise’, ‘usethis’, ‘callr’, ‘cli’, ‘covr’, ‘crayon’, ‘desc’,
‘digest’, ‘DT’, ‘ellipsis’, ‘glue’, ‘git2r’, ‘httr’, ‘jsonlite’,
‘memoise’, ‘pkgbuild’, ‘pkgload’, ‘rcmdcheck’, ‘remotes’, ‘rlang’,
‘roxygen2’, ‘rstudioapi’, ‘rversions’, ‘sessioninfo’, ‘testthat’, ‘withr’
How does this make any sense? Is this expected, and if yes, how can I prevent it from happening? I am using R 3.5.3 with 0-Cloud mirror.

Answer 1

If you play around with tools::package_dependencies() a little bit you will eventually find that devtools imports the package DT, which in turn imports the package crosstalk which in turn imports the package shiny.
So why does devtools import DT?
A quick search of the github repo for devtools reveals the following NEWS.md item from version 2.2.0:
Add the DT package as a dependency, so that test_coverage() and test_coverage_file() work without having to install additional packages (#2085).
Why did the package author make this choice? Well if you read the referenced issue you'll see there was actually some disagreement about it between two devs and it seems like it was added because it was causing additional package installs that at least one of them found annoying.
This discussion was referenced in yet another issue with even more discussion here where other devs complained about it at length, including a comment recently by yourself.
And thus, the snake that is this Q&A has now swallowed its tail.