For what it is worth, I too would like to see something regarding a "Support" field in the description.
One issue with a single maintainer email is that it does make it difficult to assure that questions get properly routed/answered given projects that have multiple contributors or an active community behind them. I would think even hinting to the best R-SIG list would be useful (in my case I typically only follow R-SIG-Finance closely and miss some questions that go to R-help) At the very least, it would make it more obvious to users where they should send general questions about a package. Best, Jeff On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Matthew Dowle <mdo...@mdowle.plus.com>wrote: > Hi, > > Have I missed something, or misunderstood? > > The r-help posting guide asks users to contact the package maintainer : > > "If the question relates to a contributed package, e.g., one > downloaded from CRAN, try contacting the package maintainer first. > [snip] ONLY [only is bold font] send such questions to R-help or R-devel > if you get no reply or need further assistance. This applies to both > requests for help and to bug reports." > > but the R-ext guide contains : > > "The mandatory ‘Maintainer’ field should give a single name with a > valid (RFC 2822) email address in angle brackets (for sending bug > reports etc.). It should not end in a period or comma. For a public > package it should be a person, not a mailing list and not a corporate > entity: do ensure that it is valid and will remain valid for the > lifetime of the package." > > Currently, data.table contains the datatable-help mailing list in the > 'Maintainer' field, with the posting guide in mind (and service levels > for users). This mailing list is where we would like users to ask > questions about the package, not r-help, and not a single person. > However, R-exts says that the 'Maintainer' email address should not be a > mailing list. > > There seems to be two requirements: > i) a non-bouncing email address that CRAN maintainers can use - more > like the 'Administrator' of the package > ii) a support address for users to send questions and bug reports > > The BugReports field in DESCRIPTION is for bugs only, and allows only a > URL, not an email address. bug.reports() has a 'package' argument and > emails the Maintainer field if the BugReports URL is not provided by the > package. So, BugReports seems close, but not quite what we'd like. > > help.request() appears to have no package argument (I checked R 2.13.0). > > Could a "Support" field (or better name) be added to DESCRIPTION, and a > 'package' argument added to help.request() which uses it? Then the > semantics of the Maintainer field can be closer to what the CRAN > maintainers seem to think of it; i.e., the package 'Administrator'. > > Have I misunderstood or missed an option? > > Matthew > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > -- Jeffrey Ryan jeffrey.r...@lemnica.com www.lemnica.com R/Finance 2011 April 29th and 30th in Chicago | www.RinFinance.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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