Only one Author

[muschellij2]

Using pkgdown::build_site, it calls desc and returns the error:

Error in ensure_authors_at_r(self) : No 'Authors@R' field!
You can create one with $add_author

if there is an Author: field but not a Authors@R: field. I simply made the field (deleting Author) and it went well.

Just wondering if you support simple, single author fields.

[muschellij2]

Is there a workaround to convert Author to Authors@R.

[gaborcsardi]

Yeah, desc should support Author. Do you know how exactly pkgdown calls desc?

[muschellij2]

Here's a MWE. If the package uses Author: and not Authors@R:, there is an error

library(desc)

x = "Package: example
Type: Package
Title: Example DESC
Version: 0.0.1
Author: John Muschelli
Maintainer: John Muschelli <muschellij2@gmail.com>
Description: Here is a description.
License: GPL-2
"

tfile = tempfile()
dir.create(tfile)
setwd(tfile)
writeLines(x, con = "DESCRIPTION" )
desc <- description$new()
desc$get_author()
desc$get_authors()

This was discussed in r-lib/pkgdown#357, but that was just a fix for that package (@hadley recommended to make an Authors@R for that DESCRIPTION). In, pkgdown, desc is called with pkgdown::pkg_authors (https://github.com/hadley/pkgdown/blob/7c49ac51d038d440c1f920fe31ea8014f8a42e81/R/build-home-authors.R#L23), which in turn calls desc::get_authors.

This call calls idesc_get_authors (

desc/R/authors-at-r.R

Line 74 in c99ccd8

idesc_get_authors <- function(self, private, ensure = TRUE) {

), and fails at ensure_authors_at_r (

desc/R/authors-at-r.R

Line 49 in c99ccd8

ensure_authors_at_r <- function(obj) {

).

[gaborcsardi]

OK, thanks! So desc::get_authors() should support a lone 'Author' field I guess. It is just hard to parse that field in general....

[gaborcsardi]

Yeah, I am not sure what I could do here, really, considering that the Authors field can be anything.

[gaborcsardi]

Maybe pkgdown could just use desc::desc_get("Author") and / or desc::desc_get("Maintainer") if Authors@R is not available?

[hadley]

Or just tell people to use Authors@R, which I have been doing ;)

[gaborcsardi]

Yeah, I think I'll close this. If packages want to handle Author themselves, they can already....

[kenahoo]

I'd like to re-open this - I submitted a ticket at r-lib/pkgdown#727 requesting support for the Author and Maintainer field, which are a standard part of DESCRIPTION files.

In my case, lack of support means I can't build pkgdown docs for packages that I don't own, when the author hasn't used Authors@R. Only 15% of the packages I attempted (91 of 577) had Authors@R, so that's a pretty low yield.

The desc package does seem like a good place for an abstracting interface that can extract author information using any of the standard supported fields from DESCRIPTION. I do understand that parsing that information may be problematic, but (e.g.) when building docs it seems quite acceptable to just leave the information in its raw form when it can't be parsed easily.

[kenahoo]

Here's a reproducible example:

x <- "Package: example
Type: Package
Title: Example DESC
Version: 0.0.1
Author: John Doe
Maintainer: John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Description: Here is a description.
License: GPL-2
"

d <- description$new(text=x)
d$get_authors()    # Fails
# Error in ensure_authors_at_r(self) : No 'Authors@R' field!
# You can create one with $add_author 

# Correct the issue & retry
d$add_author(d$get_maintainer())
d$get_authors()    # Succeeds
# [1] "John Doe <jdoe@example.com>"