utils::citation() offers the option auto=(NULL|TRUE) to obtain the citations for a package from the package DESCRIPTION file or a CITATION file, as described below:
|auto| a logical indicating whether the default citation auto-generated from the package 'DESCRIPTION' metadata should be used or not, or |NULL| (default), indicating that a 'CITATION' file is used if it exists, or an object of class |"packageDescription <http://127.0.0.1:11936/library/utils/help/packageDescription>"| with package metadata (see below). This presents a problem when citation() is used in functions such as bibtex::write.bib() and knitr::write_bib(), because the "base" package is treated specially in citation() and does not allow auto=TRUE > citation("base",auto=TRUE) Error in citation("base", auto = TRUE) : broken installation, no CITATION file in the base package. > This is a strange and misleading message, since the base package, presumably by design has no CITATION file. It requires a workaround in functions like knitr::write_bib when given a list of packages, bib = sapply(x, function(pkg) { cite = citation(pkg, auto = if (pkg == "base") NULL else TRUE) entry = toBibtex(cite) entry[1] = sub("\\{,$", sprintf("{R-%s,", pkg), entry[1]) gsub("", "", entry) }, simplify = FALSE) Is there some reason why citation() can't simply ignore auto=TRUE (perhaps with a message) for the base package? -- Michael Friendly Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca Professor, Psychology Dept. & Chair, Quantitative Methods York University Voice: 416 736-2100 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814 4700 Keele Street Web: http://www.datavis.ca Toronto, ONT M3J 1P3 CANADA [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
