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Diagnose DESCRIPTION Fields R Does Not Know

Source: R/diagnostics-description-fields.R
lab_description_fields.Rd

Flags a DESCRIPTION field that is not one of the fields R knows, which is how CRAN's incoming check reads it. The usual one is Remotes, which devtools and pak read but CRAN does not, since CRAN installs dependencies from CRAN and Bioconductor alone. The others are typos such as Bugreports, Import, Suggest or URLs, which R ignores, so the field meant is silently missing; the finding names the field that was probably meant.

Usage

lab_description_fields(path = ".", verbose = TRUE, desc = NULL)

Arguments

path

Character. Path to the package directory. Default: ".".

verbose

Logical. Print diagnostic output. Default: TRUE.

desc

Optional pre-parsed DESCRIPTION, as returned by base::read.dcf(). Defaults to reading it from path.

Value

checktor_check_result() with passed, issues, message.

Details

The fields R allows beyond its own list are allowed here too: any Config/ field, such as Config/testthat/edition, and fields starting X-CRAN, X-schema.org, Repository/R-Forge or VCS/, and a standard field name followed by Note, such as RoxygenNote.

Source

The CRAN incoming check run by R CMD check --as-cran NOTEs "Unknown, possibly misspelled, fields in DESCRIPTION". The CRAN Repository Policy says "The strong dependencies ... should be available from CRAN or the Bioconductor software repository", which is why a Remotes field has no place in a submission. See vignette("check-sources", package = "checktor") for how every check maps to its source.

See also

checktor(), which runs this and every other check.

Examples

pkg <- example_diagnose_scenario("description_examples/description_fields_bad.txt",
                                 show_content = FALSE)
lab_description_fields(pkg, verbose = FALSE)$issues
#> [1] "Import: not a DESCRIPTION field R knows; did you mean Imports?"                                                                      
#> [2] "Bugreports: not a DESCRIPTION field R knows; did you mean BugReports?"                                                               
#> [3] "Remotes: not a DESCRIPTION field R knows; CRAN installs dependencies from CRAN and Bioconductor only, so remove it before submitting"
unlink(pkg, recursive = TRUE)