My CRAN package eha depends on the survival package, and that creates problems with innocent users: It is about the 'frailty' function (mainly). While (after 'library(eha)')

f1 <- coxph(Surv(time, status) ~ age + frailty(inst), data = lung)

produces what you would expect (a frailty survival analysis), the use of the coxreg function from eha

f2 <- coxreg(Surv(time, status) ~ age + frailty(inst), data = lung)

produces (almost) nonsense. That's because the survival::frailty function essentially returns its input and coxreg is happy with that, treats it as an ordinary numeric (or factor) covariate, and nonsense is produced, but some users think otherwise. (Maybe it would be better to introduce frailty in a separate argument?)

I want to prevent this to happen, but I do not understand how to do it in the best way. I tried to move survival from Depends: to Imports: and adding import(survival, except = c(frailty, cluster)) to NAMESPACE. This had the side effect that a user must qualify the Surv function by survival::Surv, not satisfactory (similarly for other popular functions in survival).

Another option I thought of was to define my own Surv function as
Surv <- survival::Surv in my package, but it doesn't feel right.
It seems to work, though.

As you may understand from this, I am not very familiar with these issues. I have used Depends: survival for a long time and been happy with that.

Any help on this is highly appreciated.

Göran

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