[Rd] Comments in the DESCRIPTION file

[Uwe Ligges]

On 06.12.2012 18:22, Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini wrote:
> 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).


Err, please do not use it yourself.
This is intended for CRAN internal purposes only, hence we call it 
X-CRAN-.... so we are assuming nobody else uses it.

Thanks,
Uwe Ligges

> 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
>