bogus link if missing BugReports

[bastistician]

If the package does not contain a BugReports field in its DESCRIPTION file, the generated home page will currently contain

Report a bug at
NA

among the links generated from data_home_sidebar_links() at

pkgdown/R/build-home-index.R

Line 82 in 36bedb2

link_url("Report a bug", pkg$desc$get("BugReports")[[1]]),

.

A solution could be to mimic what R's bug.report() does since R 2.11.0, i.e., fall back on the maintainer's e-mail address if BugReports is unspecified:

Report a bug to
Joe.Developer@some.domain.net

Alternatively, not including such a link at all would actually best reflect the package DESCRIPTION and possibly the authors intention, so I would favour this more defensive solution. Note that it is always possible for the package authors to manually add intended bug report links to the homepage via the pkgdown configuration file.

[jayhesselberth]

Could be merged with #694

[bastistician]

I could prepare a PR which modifies data_home_sidebar_links() in that it generates a link for bug reports only if the DESCRIPTION actually has a "BugReports" field. Is that acceptable?

[hadley]

@bastistician yes, that would be great!

[bastistician]

Oops, I now see that @jayhesselberth has also worked on a solution for this issue (#871), where the maintainer's e-mail address is used as a fallback link. As mentioned above, I would prefer if pkgdown took the more defensive approach of only including a link in the sidebar if and only if there actually is a BugReports field in the DESCRIPTION (#872). That also avoids spreading plain-text e-mail addresses on websites.

[jayhesselberth]

Yours is the simpler solution and I think preferable. Closing #871 for now.