DESCRIPTION and PACKAGES files.

asr at ufl.edu (Allen S. Rout) writes:

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

And that is the reason: everyone who downloads pays the price for unneeded 
fields in that file.  It was a deliberate decision to minimize download 
times, which are already substantial for people on a dialup connection.

OK, that meets the definition of "not well recieved" ;) 

For the Bioconductor project, we also wanted more information to be
programatically available regarding the packages in a repository.
Instead of bloating the PACKAGES file, we put a separate file, VIEWS
in our repository.  Here is an example:

http://bioconductor.org/packages/1.8/bioc/VIEWS

This file is used to generate the HTML pages that describe our
packages (happy to share the code for generating the VIEWS file if you
like).

So, if you were able to host a CRAN mirror, you could annotate it
similarly.

+ seth