[R-pkg-devel] Spelling and manual CRAN inspection

[Kevin R. Coombes]

Hi,

   I have been updating a couple of R packages this morning. One of them
triggered a manual inspection for "possibly mis-spelled words in
DESCRIPTION" for my last name (Coombes) --- even though none of the
other 20 packages that I maintain has ever triggered that particular
NOTE. A second package also triggered a manual inspection for
mis-spelled words including "Proteomics". (These flags only arose on the
debian CRAN machine, not the Windows CRAN machine, and not on my home
machines. And let's ignore how many spelling corrections I had to make
while typing this email)

*My question, however, is: why should this NOTE ever trigger a manual
inspection?* That makes more work for the CRAN maintainers, who I am
sure have better things to do than evaluate spelling. Anything that
would actually stop the package from working (mis-spelling a keyword, or
mis-spelling the name of package that is imported) is going to cause an
automatic ERROR and a rejection of the submission without making more
work for the CRAN maintainers. The other mis-spellings may reflect
poorly on the package author, but since they are NOTEs, it is easy
enough to get them fixed for the next round without making human
eyeballs look at them.

Best,
    Kevin