more focused dependency options?

[pearsonca]

I'm using socialmixr in a little analysis, purely for its contact matrix manipulation functionality. Adding socialmixr ended up actually adding 22 package dependencies, which don't really seem relevant to my use of the package. Feels like a lot.

What might be a nice solution here is something like the core calculation(s) (e.g. looking at a single population demography + contact pattern data) extracted into a smixrlite package which provides only the math and none of the (useful, but potentially superfluous for some users) other capabilities. socialmixr could then wrap those core capabilities with the current interface.

[sbfnk]

My main worry here would be the added burden of maintenance with two separate packages (requiring integration tests spanning both packages). Not insurmountable but worth considering if the benefits from splitting outweighs these drawbacks.

That said both the downloading and plotting functions could probably stand on their own and have separate dependencies.

Currently socialmixr has 12 dependencies, which is well within the CRAN limit of 20.