[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description

[Roger D. Peng]

I don't think having 'R CMD check' spit out a warning about the date would be 
all that productive.  I do think it would be nice to have 'R CMD build' add a 
Date: field to the DESCRIPTION file if there isn't already a Date: field.  And I 
think such an addition would solve the first problem since maintainers wouldn't 
have to bother maintaining a date field.

-roger

Kurt Hornik wrote:
>>>>>> hadley wickham writes:
> 
>> I'm always forgetting to update the date in DESCRIPTION.  Would it be
>> possible to add a warning to R CMD check if it's old?
> 
> 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.
> 
> Best
> -k
> 
> 
> 
>> Hadley
> 
>> -- 
>> http://had.co.nz/
> 
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-- 
Roger D. Peng  |  http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/