Why does tidyverse still require plyr to load

Question

According to my understanding, dplyr is the successor to plyr, hence the tidyverse does not require plyr as a dependent. When I try to load tidyverse, though, I receive the following error:

> the 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’
Using install to manually install plyr.
tidyverse loads without error after calling package("plyr"). However, because plyrfunctions can occasionally obscure dplyr functions, I'd rather not have it installed.

May someone please clarify why tidyverse still need plyr and how I can load it without it? Plyr isn't listed as a dependency in the documentation for dplyr on CRAN.

I'm running R version 3.5.2 in RStudio

Answer 1

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.

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