Section 1.1 of R-exts mentions that the Maintainer and Author fields can be
omitted from the DESCRIPTION file if Authors@R is supplied.  However, R CMD
check does not seem to like this.

package.skeleton("foo")
desc <- readLines("foo/DESCRIPTION")
desc[6] <- "Authors@R: person('Mathew', 'McLean', email = 'name@example.com',
role = c('aut', 'cre'))"
desc <- desc[-7]
writeLines(desc, "foo/DESCRIPTION")
system2("R", args = c("CMD", "check", "foo"))
* using log directory ‘/home/grad/mmclean/foo.Rcheck’
* using R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
* using platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
* using session charset: UTF-8
* checking for file ‘foo/DESCRIPTION’ ... ERROR
Required fields missing or empty:
  ‘Author’ ‘Maintainer’

sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.3 (2014-03-06)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base


​This also happens for R Under development (unstable) (2014-04-10 r65396)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)​


-- 
Mathew W. McLean
Research Assistant Professor
462 Blocker Building
Texas A&M University
www.stat.tamu.edu/~mmclean

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