[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description

Antonio, Fabio Di Narzo antonio.fabio at gmail.com
Fri Apr 4 22:20:08 CEST 2008


I agree.
It sounds odd to explicitely ask someone to set the 'Date:' field and
then worring because it doesn't match your precise expectation that it
should equal the build time.

A.F.


2008/4/4, Roger D. Peng <rpeng at jhsph.edu>:
> 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/
>  >
>  >> ______________________________________________
>
> >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>  >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>  >
>  > ______________________________________________
>  > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>  > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>  >
>
>
> --
>  Roger D. Peng  |  http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/
>
>
>  ______________________________________________
>  R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>  https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>


-- 
Antonio, Fabio Di Narzo
Ph.D. student at
Department of Statistical Sciences
University of Bologna, Italy



More information about the R-devel mailing list