On Thu, 2015-06-11 at 09:31 -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 11/06/2015 9:15 AM, Kevin Coombes wrote:
Hi,
When I run "R CMD check --as-cran" on my packages in R 3.2.0, I now get
a new series of NOTE's telling me that (1) the Description field in the
DESCRIPTION should file should not start with "This package" or with the
package name, and (2) the Title field in the DESCRIPTION file should be
in title case.
Question: Is there any way to turn these notes off and still get the
rest of cran-style checking?
Grumpy Observation: In reaction to (1), I went to CRAN and randomly
clicked on a dozen packages to see how many of them follow this rule.
Half of them violate it explicitly, mostly just starting with "This
package...". Most of the rest get around it by starting with a sentence
fragment that omits the subject (which is _implicitly_ "this package").
Only one of them started with a complete sentence that gave the
background of the problem the package was intended to solve.
I strongly believe that it's better to write complete sentences than
sentence fragments in the Description field. And since the empirical
evidence suggest that almost everyone at least implicitly starts their
description with "This package", I'm not sure why the NOTE ever got
added in the first place....
Presumably those packages were last updated before the tests were added.
To expand on Duncan's point, my understanding is that a NOTE does not,
by itself, trigger a request for a package update. However, when you do
send an update to CRAN it should be free of NOTEs, or the ones that do
remain should be explained.
R checks can be customized by setting certain environment variables of
the form _R_CHECK_*_. See R Internals section 8, which lists them
(including a set that will approximate the CRAN tests) and Writing R
Extensions section 1.3 which tells you how to set them. But of course
--as-cran is exactly what you need if you intend to submit a package to
CRAN.
Martyn
I don't know the answer to your question other than the generic "Of
course there is, R is open source", but I don't really see the point of
deeper research: you can certainly ignore the NOTEs more easily than
suppressing them, so why not do that?
Duncan Murdoch