From Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at  Fri Apr  4 21:26:20 2008
From: Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 21:26:20 +0200
Subject: [Rd] R CMD check should check date in description
In-Reply-To: <f8e6ff050804041205i18227c9dq41dbe5c4241b5605@mail.gmail.com>
References: <f8e6ff050804041205i18227c9dq41dbe5c4241b5605@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <18422.32988.112442.175233@fangorn.hornik.net>

>>>>> hadley wickham writes:

> I'm always forgetting to update the date in DESCRIPTION.  Would it be
> possible to add a warning to R CMD check if it's old?

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.

Best
-k



> Hadley

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

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[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description
Kurt Hornik