[R-pkg-devel] R CMD check "no-nanny" option?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/06/2015 9:15 AM, Kevin Coombes wrote:
> Hi,
>
> When I run "R CMD check --as-cran" on my packages in R 3.2.0, I now get
> a new series of NOTE's telling me that (1) the Description field in the
> DESCRIPTION should file should not start with "This package" or with the
> package name, and (2) the Title field in the DESCRIPTION file should be
> in title case.
>
> Question: Is there any way to turn these notes off and still get the
> rest of cran-style checking?
>
> Grumpy Observation: In reaction to (1), I went to CRAN and randomly
> clicked on a dozen packages to see how many of them follow this rule.
> Half of them violate it explicitly, mostly just starting with "This
> package...".  Most of the rest get around it by starting with a sentence
> fragment that omits the subject (which is _implicitly_ "this package").
> Only one of them started with a complete sentence that gave the
> background of the problem the package was intended to solve.
>
> I strongly believe that it's better to write complete sentences than
> sentence fragments in the Description field. And since the empirical
> evidence suggest that almost everyone at least implicitly starts their
> description with "This package", I'm not sure why the NOTE ever got
> added in the first place....

Presumably those packages were last updated before the tests were added.

I don't know the answer to your question other than the generic "Of 
course there is, R is open source", but I don't really see the point of 
deeper research:  you can certainly ignore the NOTEs more easily than 
suppressing them, so why not do that?

Duncan Murdoch