[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description

[hadley wickham]

>  I recently thought about this.  I see several issues.
>
>  * How can we determine if it is "old"?  Relative to the time when the
>   package was uploaded to a repository?
>
>  * Some developers might actually want a different date for a variety of
>   reasons ...
>
>  * What we currently say in R-exts is
>
>      The optional `Date' field gives the release date of the current
>      version of the package.  It is strongly recommended to use the
>      yyyy-mm-dd format conforming to the ISO standard.
>
>   Many packages do not comply with the latter (but I have some code to
>   sanitize most of these), and "release date" may be a moving target.
>
>  The best that I could think of is to teach R CMD build to *add* a Date
>  field if there was none.

That sounds like a good solution to me.  Otherwise, maybe just a
message from R CMD check?  i.e. just like failing the codetools
checks, it might be perfectly ok, but you should be doing it
consciously, not by mistake.

Hadley


-- 
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