WRE Date field & CRAN

Hi Duncan,

Thanks for the fast check and reply.

Indeed, the documentation is correct. I just think it can be interpreted as
saying Date is required to submit to CRAN.
Some package maintainers have been using the Date field, probably
interpreting this section this way because if you read the main text and
the footnote all together it says:

"The optional ?Date? field gives the *release date* of the current version
of the package. It is strongly recommended [and required by CRAN, so
checked by R CMD check --as-cran.] to use the ?yyyy-mm-dd? format
conforming to the ISO 8601 standard."

The footnote could be moved to the end of the sentence to clarify CRAN's
requirements are about the format not the field.
So it is read as:

"The optional ?Date? field gives the *release date* of the current version
of the package. It is strongly recommended to use the ?yyyy-mm-dd? format
conforming to the ISO 8601 standard [and required by CRAN, so checked by R
CMD check --as-cran.]."

I think the later is more clear to the package developers reading the WRE.

Llu?s


On Sun, 6 Apr 2025 at 17:40, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

On 2025-04-06 10:55 a.m., Llu?s Revilla wrote:

Hi,

On Writing R Extensions there is a footnote [6] about the "Date" field on
the DESCRIPTION file being required by CRAN:

"required by CRAN, so checked by R CMD check --as-cran"

I think this is no longer up to date, as I've seen packages published on
CRAN without it.
This might be because now the Packaged date is checked too (around
src/tools/R/QC.R line 7998).

I believe the text says Date is optional, but if present, the format is
checked by CRAN.  So a missing date isn't evidence of an issue, but
using a non-standard format would be.

I just did a check, and got this NOTE:

The Date field is not in ISO 8601 yyyy-mm-dd format.

So I think the docs are correct.

Duncan Murdoch