[Bioc-devel] S4 Methods Documentation Convention Triggers Warnings

[Dario Strbenac]

Good day,

For a long time, it has been a convention to document S4 methods in the format:

\section{Displaying}{
  In the code snippets below, \code{x} is a GRanges object.
  \describe{
    \item{}{
      \code{show(x)}:
      Displays the first five and last five elements.
    }
  }
}

In R Under Development, this is now a warning:

* checking Rd files ... WARNING
checkRd: (5) GRanges-class.Rd:115-165: \item in \describe must have non-empty label.

This affects my own package as well as the core Bioconductor packages which I used as inspiration for designing my pacakge documentation seven years ago. What should the new convention be? Or could R developers be convinced to get rid of this check before this prototype is released?

--------------------------------------
Dario Strbenac
University of Sydney
Camperdown NSW 2050
Australia