> Laurent, > > blank lines between records are not allowed in DESCRIPTION, because > they separate paragraphs in DCF and a package must consist of a single > paragraph. This properly is used by R for multi-package DCF files > where each paragraph defines one package. Blank lines at the end may > be tolerated, because there is no second paragraph in that case. If > you look at the commit you quote (r60495), it specifically adds an > error if there is more than one paragraph.
Thank you very much for the clarification - makes perfect sense now! Laurent > Cheers, > Simon > > > On Nov 26, 2013, at 6:03 PM, Laurent Gatto <lg...@cam.ac.uk> wrote: > >> 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 >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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