[Rd] Comments in the DESCRIPTION file

Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini mauricio.zambrano at jrc.ec.europa.eu
Thu Dec 6 18:22:47 CET 2012


On 07/11/12 11:01, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On 07/11/12 09:53, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 12-11-07 4:26 AM, Christophe Genolini wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Is it possible to add comments in the DESCRIPTION file?
>>
>>
>> The read.dcf function is used to read the DESCRIPTION file, and it
>> doesn't support comments. (The current Debian control format
>> description does appear to support comments with leading # markers, but
>> R's read.dcf function doesn't support these.)
>>
>> You could probably get away with something like
>>
>> #: this is a comment
>>
>> since unrecognized fields are ignored, but I think this fact is
>> undocumented so I would say it's safer to assume that comments are not
>> supported.
>
> In that form, but lots of people have fields like
>
> Note: this is a comment
>
> and CRAN uses
>
> X-CRAN-Comment:
>
Dear Prof. Ripley,

Last week I used the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field in the DESCRIPTION file of a 
package that now is on CRAN. However, the comment I added is not shown 
on the web page of the package on CRAN 
(http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hydroPSO).

Does it mean that the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field is not actually used by 
CRAN or it is used but not shown on the CRAN web page of the package ?

Thanks in advance,

Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini

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