Using a package imports some other unwanted packages, how to find out where is the unwanted package from?

General Usage
,
1

I found out some unwanted package A is imported and cause name space conflict with my own module Main. I didn’t import/using package A, so it must be loaded by other other package that I import/using. How could I find out which package loaded package A?

2

I may be wrong here, but I think importing or using a package/module into your code should not bring any other module/package into your namespace besides the explicited one. Are you sue this is what is happening? Can you post the error message?

3

You can always go through your packages manually like this

julia> using B

julia> A
ERROR: UndefVarError: A not defined

julia> using C

julia> A
A

where we see that (in this example) B was not exporting A but C was.

4

This is a bit tedious when you import many packages. Is there a shortcut?

5

I found the culprit.

Somehow using Plots also loadsalpha from package ColorTypes

using Plots
julia> ColorTypes.alpha
alpha (generic function with 5 methods)

This conflict with my const alpha =1
What I don’t understand is that in Plots I don’t see its dependence on ColorTypes

So is it true that import/using one package won’t load other packages?

7

I believe not, one package can export whatever they want and they may export things from other packages.

No direct dependance, but

(@v1.6) pkg> activate --temp
  Activating new environment at `/tmp/jl_bxylqu/Project.toml`

(jl_bxylqu) pkg> st
      Status `/tmp/jl_bxylqu/Project.toml` (empty project)

(jl_bxylqu) pkg> add Plots
    Updating registry at `~/.julia/registries/General`
   Resolving package versions...
   Installed Latexify ─────── v0.15.7
   Installed StatsBase ────── v0.33.12
   Installed ChainRulesCore ─ v1.10.0
    Updating `/tmp/jl_bxylqu/Project.toml`
  [91a5bcdd] + Plots v1.22.6
    Updating `/tmp/jl_bxylqu/Manifest.toml`
  [79e6a3ab] + Adapt v3.3.1
  [d360d2e6] + ChainRulesCore v1.10.0
  [35d6a980] + ColorSchemes v3.15.0
  [3da002f7] + ColorTypes v0.11.0
...

so it is somewhere in the dependancy tree.