I don't think having 'R CMD check' spit out a warning about the date would be all that productive. I do think it would be nice to have 'R CMD build' add a Date: field to the DESCRIPTION file if there isn't already a Date: field. And I think such an addition would solve the first problem since maintainers wouldn't have to bother maintaining a date field.
-roger Kurt Hornik wrote: >>>>>> 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/ > >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > -- Roger D. Peng | http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
