On 2025-11-17 9:24 p.m., Julian Grimm wrote:
Hello together,I have a question regarding the Authors@R field. When I run R CMD check . in a package either created by myself with pkgKitten::kitten, usethis::create_package or even on existing packages on Cran (e.g. the validate package), I get the following error: * checking for file ‘./DESCRIPTION’ ... ERROR Required fields missing or empty: ‘Author’ ‘Maintainer’ * DONE The corresponding line in the DESCRIPTION file is: Authors@R: person("Your", "Name", role = c("aut", "cre"), email = "[email protected]") and Authors@R: person("First", "Last", , "[email protected]", role = c("aut", "cre")) for pkgKitten and usethis respectively. Why does this error occur?
You haven't built the package. Some checks only succeed on a built copy of a package, i.e. the *.tar.gz file. The devtools::check() function will do both the build and test.
Part of building the package modifies the DESCRIPTION file to insert the Author and Maintainer fields. Another important difference is that .Rbuildignore is processed, so you won't get warnings about files that shouldn't be there, or false success if you accidentally specify ignoring a file that should be kept.
Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
