Authors@R: and Author field

On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 12:55 AM, Knut Krueger <rh at knut-krueger.de> wrote:

Hi to all


Authors at R: c(person("fooa","foob", role = c("aut","cre"),
                       email = "fooa.foob at fooc.de"),
          person("foo1","foo2", role = c("ctb"),
                  email = "foo1.foo2 at foo3.de"))
Author: fooa foob, with contributions from foo1 foo2
using r CMD check --as-cran ..   (R 3.1 and Windows) I get an error

Author field differs from that derived from Authors at R
    Author:    'fooa foob, with contributions from foo1 foo2
    Authors at R: 'fooa foob [aut, cre], foo1 foo2 [ctb]'

as I can see it is the same as in
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#The-DESCRIPTION-file

and additionally

  > Both 'Author' and 'Maintainer' fields can be omitted if a suitable

'Authors at R' field is given.

Yes, that passage in WRE is confusing/misleading, because it will give
a NOTE with 'R CMD check --as-cran'
[https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15470].   In
order not to get that NOTE, you need to use:

Authors at R: c(person("fooa","foob", role = c("aut","cre"), email =
"fooa.foob at fooc.de"),
                      person("foo1","foo2", role = c("ctb"), email =
"foo1.foo2 at foo3.de"))
Author: fooa foob [aut, cre], foo1 foo2 [ctb]

The 'Author' field *must be the same* as the string generated by R
from 'Authors at R'.

is not working if the Author field is empty  or missing it will give an
error

Actually, you can drop the 'Author' field

package on legacy versions of R.  I think in R (>= 2.14.0), you can
use the 'Authors at R' field by itself.  Many package do that.

Hope this helps,

Henrik

Kind regards Knut

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