[R-pkg-devel] "Version contains leading zeroes" note: clarity

[Ben Bolker]

   Hi folks,

   I got the dreaded

Version contains leading zeroes

NOTE from a package check - the version was 0.0.1.000.

until I dug into the code and found the regex "(^|[.-])0[0-9]+" I didn't 
realize the restriction was on leading zeroes *within a version 
component* - I was interpreting it as leftmost in the whole version 
(i.e., the initial 0).

   I eventually found the documentation in ?package_version (feels like 
it should also be pointed to somewhere in Writing R Extensions?

Numeric versions are sequences of one or more non-negative
      integers, usually (e.g., in package ‘DESCRIPTION’ files)
      represented as character strings with the elements of the sequence
      concatenated and separated by single ‘.’ or ‘-’ characters.  R
      package versions consist of at least two such integers, an R
      system version of exactly three (major, minor and patchlevel).

Doesn't say anything about leading zero(e)s here ...

   "Zeroes" looks weird to me, but I see that "zeroes" is used on 26 
lines in .Rd files in the R code base, while "zeros" is used on 36 lines 
... so close to a tie. (Maybe someone wants to clean this up ... ? 
Maybe a mini-project for the R bug sprint at the end of the summer?

   Also, I'm sure this has been asked a few 100 times but: a new-to-CRAN 
maintainer triggers a NOTE.  Is there any way that a new user would know 
that this was informational only?  (There is also a 
Note_to_CRAN_maintainers 
<https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/blob/0252cdbf14c73acd26ae2090df3c04aa6118b523/src/library/tools/R/check.R#L6009>: 
wouldn't that be more appropriate here?)

   cheers
    Ben Bolker