[Rd] Comments in the DESCRIPTION file

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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:

You can also add comments in Authors at R fields.

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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