From h.wickham at gmail.com  Fri Apr  4 21:54:06 2008
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (hadley wickham)
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 14:54:06 -0500
Subject: [Rd] R CMD check should check date in description
In-Reply-To: <18422.32988.112442.175233@fangorn.hornik.net>
References: <f8e6ff050804041205i18227c9dq41dbe5c4241b5605@mail.gmail.com>
	<18422.32988.112442.175233@fangorn.hornik.net>
Message-ID: <f8e6ff050804041254v68b476d2i20369d50fc03d53e@mail.gmail.com>

>  I recently thought about this.  I see several issues.
>
>  * How can we determine if it is "old"?  Relative to the time when the
>   package was uploaded to a repository?
>
>  * Some developers might actually want a different date for a variety of
>   reasons ...
>
>  * What we currently say in R-exts is
>
>      The optional `Date' field gives the release date of the current
>      version of the package.  It is strongly recommended to use the
>      yyyy-mm-dd format conforming to the ISO standard.
>
>   Many packages do not comply with the latter (but I have some code to
>   sanitize most of these), and "release date" may be a moving target.
>
>  The best that I could think of is to teach R CMD build to *add* a Date
>  field if there was none.

That sounds like a good solution to me.  Otherwise, maybe just a
message from R CMD check?  i.e. just like failing the codetools
checks, it might be perfectly ok, but you should be doing it
consciously, not by mistake.

Hadley


-- 
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description
hadley wickham