The Depends and Imports fields in the DESCRIPTION file can cause a lot of confusion 
to those new to package building! Both of these fields contain package dependencies 
which are installed when you install the package. However, the difference between 
them is that the packages listed in depends are attached when the package is loaded, 
whereas the packages listed in imports are not.

This distinction is important because if two different packages have an identically 
named function, the version of the function from the package which has been loaded 
most recently will be used. Therefore, to make sure you are using the correct 
function, it is best practice to use imports to list your dependencies and then in 
your code explicitly name the package and function it's from in the form 
package::function(), e.g. dplyr::select().

In the majority of cases, you should only list the version of R required in the 
Depends field and the package in the Imports field.




# Add dplyr as an imported dependency to the DESCRIPTION file
use_package("dplyr", pkg = "datasummary")

# Add purrr as an imported dependency to the DESCRIPTION file
use_package("purrr", pkg = "datasummary")

# Add tidyr as an imported dependency to the DESCRIPTION file
use_package("tidyr", pkg = "datasummary")