Maintainer not returned as author from DESCRIPTION with classic fields

[dpprdan]

When reading description files with ‘Author’ and ‘Maintainer’ fields (but without ‘<Authors@R>’) and with roles specified in brackets, the maintainer/author is not returned as an author by get_author(s)().

Example from WRE (again without ‘<Authors@R>’):

library(desc)

d <- desc(text =
            "Package: pkgname
Version: 0.5-1
Date: 2015-01-01
Title: My First Collection of Functions
Author: Joe Developer [aut, cre],
  Pat Developer [aut],
  A. User [ctb]
Maintainer: Joe Developer <Joe.Developer@some.domain.net>
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0), nlme
Suggests: MASS
Description: A (one paragraph) description of what
  the package does and why it may be useful.
License: GPL (>= 2)
URL: https://www.r-project.org, http://www.another.url
BugReports: https://pkgname.bugtracker.url"
)

d$coerce_authors_at_r()

‘Joe Developer [aut, cre]’ is returned as a maintainer

d$get_author("cre")
#> [1] "Joe Developer <Joe.Developer@some.domain.net> [cre]"

But not as an author

d$get_author("aut")
#> [1] "Pat Developer [aut]" "A. User [aut]"

get_authors() also returns him as a maintainer only, i.e. the aut tag is missing

str(d$get_authors())
#> List of 3
#>  $ :Class 'person'  hidden list of 1
#>   ..$ :List of 5
#>   .. ..$ given  : chr "Joe"
#>   .. ..$ family : chr "Developer"
#>   .. ..$ role   : chr "cre"
#>   .. ..$ email  : chr "Joe.Developer@some.domain.net"
#>   .. ..$ comment: NULL
#>  $ :Class 'person'  hidden list of 1
#>   ..$ :List of 5
#>   .. ..$ given  : chr "Pat"
#>   .. ..$ family : chr "Developer"
#>   .. ..$ role   : chr "aut"
#>   .. ..$ email  : NULL
#>   .. ..$ comment: NULL
#>  $ :Class 'person'  hidden list of 1
#>   ..$ :List of 5
#>   .. ..$ given  : chr "A."
#>   .. ..$ family : chr "User"
#>   .. ..$ role   : chr "aut"
#>   .. ..$ email  : NULL
#>   .. ..$ comment: NULL
#>  - attr(*, "class")= chr "person"

Session info

sessioninfo::session_info()
#> - Session info ---------------------------------------------------------------
#>  setting  value                       
#>  version  R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31)
#>  os       Windows 10 x64              
#>  system   x86_64, mingw32             
#>  ui       RTerm                       
#>  language EN                          
#>  collate  German_Germany.1252         
#>  ctype    German_Germany.1252         
#>  tz       Europe/Berlin               
#>  date     2021-10-05                  
#> 
#> - Packages -------------------------------------------------------------------
#>  package     * version date       lib source            
#>  cli           3.0.1   2021-07-17 [1] standard (@3.0.1) 
#>  crayon        1.4.1   2021-02-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  desc        * 1.4.0   2021-09-28 [1] standard (@1.4.0) 
#>  digest        0.6.28  2021-09-23 [1] standard (@0.6.28)
#>  evaluate      0.14    2019-05-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  fastmap       1.1.0   2021-01-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  fs            1.5.0   2020-07-31 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  glue          1.4.2   2020-08-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  highr         0.9     2021-04-16 [1] standard (@0.9)   
#>  htmltools     0.5.2   2021-08-25 [1] standard (@0.5.2) 
#>  knitr         1.36    2021-09-29 [1] standard (@1.36)  
#>  magrittr      2.0.1   2020-11-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  R6            2.5.1   2021-08-19 [1] standard (@2.5.1) 
#>  reprex        2.0.1   2021-08-05 [1] standard (@2.0.1) 
#>  rlang         0.4.11  2021-04-30 [1] standard (@0.4.11)
#>  rmarkdown     2.11    2021-09-14 [1] standard (@2.11)  
#>  rprojroot     2.0.2   2020-11-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  rstudioapi    0.13    2020-11-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  sessioninfo   1.1.1   2018-11-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  stringi       1.7.5   2021-10-04 [1] standard (@1.7.5) 
#>  stringr       1.4.0   2019-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.4)    
#>  withr         2.4.2   2021-04-18 [1] standard (@2.4.2) 
#>  xfun          0.26    2021-09-14 [1] standard (@0.26)  
#>  yaml          2.2.1   2020-02-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.0.3)    
#> 
#> [1] D:/Users/Daniel/Documents/R/win-library/4.0
#> [2] C:/Program Files/R/R-4.0.5/library

[gaborcsardi]

Seems like a bug in $coerce_authors_at_r() to me.

[dpprdan]

It is, but it seems intentional?! Not entirely sure why, though (added in PR #46).

desc/R/authors-at-r.R

Lines 399 to 406 in daece0e

	# If Maintainer in Author field, remove it and keep the maintainer one
	# may want to use del_author
	check_same = function(x) {
	identical(c(man$given, man$family),
	c(x$given, x$family))
	}
	same_auth = sapply(auth, check_same)
	auth = auth[!same_auth]

There is another issue that I only saw now: A. User is returned as author, but should be returned as a contributor.

[dpprdan]

Not entirely sure why, though

I get it now, the idea is to get the maintainer info (e.g. email) from the maintainer field and then concatenate these two person lists (maintainer & author).

The main problem is that the current code works under the assumption that the Author field does not contain information about the roles (i.e. no [aut, cre], [ctb], etc.) and therefore overwrites these when they are present.

I could try to make a PR, but cannot get devtools::load_all(".") to work:

> devtools::load_all(".")
i Loading desc
Error in create_ns_env(path) : Namespace for desc already exists.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

[gaborcsardi]

desc does not work with load_all(), it is a bug in pkgload.

[gaborcsardi]

So Authors is a free-form field, e.g. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/igraph/DESCRIPTION. I am not sure if it is worth putting effort into parsing it, TBH.

Maybe we could advise the user better about this, though.

[dpprdan]

it is a bug in pkgload

Seems to be fixed in GitHub version

Authors is a free-form field

It will never be perfect of course, but maybe a tad better than now.