From lg390 at cam.ac.uk  Wed Nov 27 00:03:22 2013
From: lg390 at cam.ac.uk (Laurent Gatto)
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:03:22 +0000
Subject: [Rd] Blank lines in DESCRIPTION
Message-ID: <87eh6222bp.fsf@cam.ac.uk>


Dear R-devel list,

I would like to enquire about the existence of blank lines in the
DESCRIPTION file.

Testing different possibilities with tools:::.read_description suggests
that starting or ending with blank lines is acceptable while blank lines
in the middle of the file get caught by

out <- tryCatch(read.dcf(dfile, keep.white = .keep_white_description_fields), 
        error = function(e) stop(gettextf("file '%s' is not in valid DCF format", 
            dfile), domain = NA, call. = FALSE))
if (nrow(out) != 1) 
    stop("contains a blank line", call. = FALSE)

and produce the error. 

However, the following news item from [1] seems to suggest that it
should not fail in case of such incorrect blank lines.

R CMD check no longer fails with an error if a ?DESCRIPTION? file incorrectly contains a blank line. (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)

This has come up here [2], when github-specific information is appended
to a DESCRIPTION file that ends with a blank line.

Thank you very much in advance.

Best wishes,

Laurent

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/2.15.3/NEWS.R-2.15.3.html
[2] https://github.com/hadley/devtools/issues/383



[Rd] Blank lines in DESCRIPTION
Laurent Gatto