# Preamble This email is to tell other developers what I did to address an issue with documenting a package. I'm not sure that I am correct in my approach -- comments would definitely be appreciated -- but at least this email is fairly concrete about the changes I made. To be honest, I don't know how to test whether my changes are suitable, since no problem is reported in local builds or in remote windows checks, and no problem is listed on the CRAN tests page.
# The problem Today I received multiple emails from K. Hornik, telling me about problems with the package-level documentation for several CRAN packages that I maintain. Here is a key part of that email: You have file 'oce/man/oce.Rd' with \docType{package}, likely intended as a package overview help file, but without the appropriate PKGNAME-package \alias as per "Documenting packages" in R-exts. # Possible solution As a test (using the 'plan' package, which is much smaller and thus ought to give faster test results), I changed my Roxygen2 block #' @name plan #' @docType package #' @author Dan Kelley NULL to read #' @name plan #' @docType package #' @author Dan Kelley #' @keywords internal "_PACKAGE" ## usethis namespace: start ## usethis namespace: end NULL Note that the two ## comments are likely not required, but I included them because I saw them at https://github.com/jonesor/mpmsim/commit/e8d0f0d657ffa24c25ddd3165c7ddcad16322e3d which I found to be quite a helpful resource. # Local testing After rebuilding locally, I can now do package?plan and get the expected documentation for the package as a whole. # CRAN submission I submitted the update to CRAN, and it has appeared as a tarball. It has not yet appeared in built-up packages sources, but perhaps the fact that I didn't get any warnings from CRAN suggests that the flaw has been addressed. # Conclusions If I am right, a simple fix is all that will be required for many packages. However, I don't know of any way to know if this fix follows recommended procedures. There appear to be multiple ways of addressing the issue. Perhaps other developers will have better solutions than the one I've outlined above. Or, if I happen to have done something right, then perhaps this email will be of some use to other developers. Dan Kelley / Department of Oceanography / Dalhousie University / Canada ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel