[SOLVED] Why does tidyverse still require plyr to load?

Why does tidyverse still require plyr to load?

From what I understand, dplyr is the successor of plyr and as such, the tidyverse doesn't need plyr as a dependency. Yet, when I try to load tidyverse, I get the following error message:

> library(tidyverse)

Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tidyverse’ in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]):
 there is no package called ‘plyr’

Manually installing plyr with install.package("plyr") fixes the error and tidyverse loads without problems. However, plyrfunctions sometimes mask dplyr functions, so I'd prefer to not have plyr installed.

Can someone explain to me why tidyverse still needs plyr and what I can do to load tidyverse without it? I checked the documentation of dplyr on CRAN and plyr isn't listed as a dependency.

I'm running R version 3.5.2 in RStudio 1.1.463 on 64-bit Windows 10.

Solution

ggplot2 still imports plyr (at least as of version 3.1.0) and ggplot2 is part of the tidyverse. Therefore you cannot successfully load the tidyverse with out plyr.