Comments in the DESCRIPTION file

On 07/11/12 11:01, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On 07/11/12 09:53, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 12-11-07 4:26 AM, Christophe Genolini wrote:

Hi all,

Is it possible to add comments in the DESCRIPTION file?

The read.dcf function is used to read the DESCRIPTION file, and it
doesn't support comments. (The current Debian control format
description does appear to support comments with leading # markers, but
R's read.dcf function doesn't support these.)

You could probably get away with something like

#: this is a comment

since unrecognized fields are ignored, but I think this fact is
undocumented so I would say it's safer to assume that comments are not
supported.

In that form, but lots of people have fields like

Note: this is a comment

and CRAN uses

X-CRAN-Comment:

Dear Prof. Ripley,

Last week I used the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field in the DESCRIPTION file of a
package that now is on CRAN. However, the comment I added is not shown
on the web page of the package on CRAN
(http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hydroPSO).

Does it mean that the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field is not actually used by
CRAN or it is used but not shown on the CRAN web page of the package ?

Thanks in advance,

Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini

On 06.12.2012 18:22, Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini wrote:

On 07/11/12 11:01, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

On 07/11/12 09:53, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 12-11-07 4:26 AM, Christophe Genolini wrote:

Hi all,

Is it possible to add comments in the DESCRIPTION file?

The read.dcf function is used to read the DESCRIPTION file, and it
doesn't support comments. (The current Debian control format
description does appear to support comments with leading # markers, but
R's read.dcf function doesn't support these.)

You could probably get away with something like

#: this is a comment

since unrecognized fields are ignored, but I think this fact is
undocumented so I would say it's safer to assume that comments are not
supported.

In that form, but lots of people have fields like

Note: this is a comment

and CRAN uses

X-CRAN-Comment:

Dear Prof. Ripley,

Last week I used the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field in the DESCRIPTION file of a
package that now is on CRAN. However, the comment I added is not shown
on the web page of the package on CRAN
(http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hydroPSO).

Err, please do not use it yourself.
This is intended for CRAN internal purposes only, hence we call it
X-CRAN-.... so we are assuming nobody else uses it.

Thanks,
Uwe Ligges

Does it mean that the 'X-CRAN-Comment' field is not actually used by
CRAN or it is used but not shown on the CRAN web page of the package ?

Thanks in advance,

Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini