svn version number

Is there some way of automatically including the svn version number
of a package in the DESCRIPTION file or otherwise so that one
can check from within R which svn version number one has?

You could do this by writing it into your Makefile, but there's no other 
existing support for it.  I'd recommend combining the URL reported by 
"svn info" with the result of svnversion to get the most informative 
version.  Watch out for cases of people who are trying to make your 
package from a tarfile, rather than an svn checkout.  We have ended up 
with some fairly tricky Makefile programming to get what we want into 
the R banner.

Duncan Murdoch