Dear R-devel list,
I would like to enquire about the existence of blank lines in the
DESCRIPTION file.
Testing different possibilities with tools:::.read_description suggests
that starting or ending with blank lines is acceptable while blank lines
in the middle of the file get caught by
out <- tryCatch(read.dcf(dfile, keep.white = .keep_white_description_fields),
error = function(e) stop(gettextf("file '%s' is not in valid DCF
format",
dfile), domain = NA, call. = FALSE))
if (nrow(out) != 1)
stop("contains a blank line", call. = FALSE)
and produce the error.
However, the following news item from [1] seems to suggest that it
should not fail in case of such incorrect blank lines.
R CMD check no longer fails with an error if a ‘DESCRIPTION’ file incorrectly
contains a blank line. (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
This has come up here [2], when github-specific information is appended
to a DESCRIPTION file that ends with a blank line.
Thank you very much in advance.
Best wishes,
Laurent
[1] http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/2.15.3/NEWS.R-2.15.3.html
[2] https://github.com/hadley/devtools/issues/383
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