[Rd] R CMD INSTALL is sensitive to trailing newlines in DESCRIPTION.in

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Hi, with R v1.7.1 (=I don't recall I saw it before) I noticed that R CMD
INSTALL sometimes generates nonsense information, e.g. "Bundle: NA",
even if there was a correct DESCRIPTION file too.  I turns out that it
happens when a DESCRIPTION.in has empty lines at the end. I have
observed this behavior on both Sun Solaris 9 and Windows XP Pro (but
here I am using unsupported Cygwin w/ perl).

Here is a reproducible example:

 1. Add an extra empty line at the end of /MASS/DESCRIPTION.in in the VR
bundle (http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/VR_7.1-8.tar.gz) to get
-------------------------------------------------------------
Package: MASS<newline>
Description: The main library and the datasets<newline>
Title: Main Library of Venables and Ripley's MASS<newline>
<newline>
-------------------------------------------------------------
 2. Run R CMD INSTALL VR_7.1-8.tar.gz
 3. The generated $R_HOME/library/MASS/DESCRIPTION file now looks like:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Package: MASS
Description: The main library and the datasets
Title: Main Library of Venables and Ripley's MASS
Bundle: NA
Priority: NA
Version: NA
Date: NA
Depends: NA
Author: NA
Maintainer: NA
BundleDescription: NA
License: NA
URL: NA
Built: R 1.7.1; sparc-sun-solaris2.9; 2003-09-19 13:40:41 
-------------------------------------------------------------
 4. Remove the last <newline> again and rerun R CMD INSTALL and
    the bundle information is correct, i.e. "Bundle: VR" etc.

Should I report this is as a bug?

Best wishes

Henrik Bengtsson

Dept. of Mathematical Statistics @ Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Lund Institute of Technology/Lund University, Sweden 
(Sweden +2h UTC, Melbourne +10 UTC, Calif. -7h UTC)
+46 708 909208 (cell), +46 46 320 820 (home), 
+1 (508) 464 6644 (global fax),
+46 46 2229611 (off), +46 46 2224623 (dept. fax)
h b @ m a t h s . l t h . s e, http://www.maths.lth.se/~hb/