[Rd] R CMD check should check date in description

[Roger D. Peng]

Actually, now that I think about it, 'R CMD build' already adds the 'Packaged:' 
field, so perhaps it wouldn't really make sense to add yet another field with 
exactly the same information....

-roger

Robert Gentleman wrote:
> 
> Kurt Hornik wrote:
>>>>>>> hadley wickham writes:
>>>> I recently thought about this.  I see several issues.
>>>>
>>>> * How can we determine if it is "old"?  Relative to the time when the
>>>> package was uploaded to a repository?
>>>>
>>>> * Some developers might actually want a different date for a variety of
>>>> reasons ...
>>>>
>>>> * What we currently say in R-exts is
>>>>
>>>> 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 standard.
>>>>
>>>> Many packages do not comply with the latter (but I have some code to
>>>> sanitize most of these), and "release date" may be a moving target.
>>>>
>>>> The best that I could think of is to teach R CMD build to *add* a Date
>>>> field if there was none.
>>> That sounds like a good solution to me.
>> Ok.  However, 2.7.0 feature freeze soon ...
> 
>    Please no.  If people want one then they should add it manually. It 
> is optional, and some of us have explicitly opted out and would like to 
> continue to do so.
> 
> 
>>> Otherwise, maybe just a message from R CMD check?  i.e. just like
>>> failing the codetools checks, it might be perfectly ok, but you should
>>> be doing it consciously, not by mistake.
>> I am working on that, too (e.g. a simple NOTE in case the date spec
>> cannot be canonicalized, etc.).  If file time stamps were realiable, we
>> could compare these to the given date.  This is I guess all we can do
>> for e.g. CRAN's daily checking (where comparing to the date the check
>> is run is not too useful) ...
> 
>    But definitely not a warning.
> 
>    Robert
> 
>> Best
>> -k
>>
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> 

-- 
Roger D. Peng  |  http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/