Multiple remotes in DESCRIPTION

[jimhester]

Issue by muschellij2
Tuesday Sep 13, 2016 at 16:07 GMT
Originally opened as r-lib/devtools#1342

---

In utils.R, for read_dcf, the code is:

read_dcf <- function(path) {
  fields <- colnames(read.dcf(path))
  as.list(read.dcf(path, keep.white = fields)[1, ])
}

I wanted to know what the expected behavior would/should be for a DESCRIPTION with duplicated fields (for example Remotes): silent, warning, or error? If all = TRUE on read.dcf, this may allow for this case to be parsed with all remotes (even conflicting), but it may be a bad case and needs an error

Parsing DESCRIPTION with default read.dcf

url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muschellij2/freesurfer/7f336cddadfa1000f128db3341893f96af9eaf51/DESCRIPTION"
destfile = file.path(tempdir(), "DESCRIPTION")
download.file(url, destfile = destfile)
dcf = read.dcf(destfile)
colnames(dcf)

##  [1] "Package"            "Type"               "Title"             
##  [4] "Version"            "Author"             "Maintainer"        
##  [7] "Description"        "Imports"            "Depends"           
## [10] "License"            "Suggests"           "VignetteBuilder"   
## [13] "Remotes"            "BugReports"         "SystemRequirements"
## [16] "RoxygenNote"

Only "last" Remotes section held

dcf[, "Remotes"]

##               Remotes 
## "neuroconductor/fslr"

Parsing DESCRIPTION with default read.dcf(all = TRUE)

dcf_all = read.dcf(destfile, all = TRUE)
colnames(dcf_all)

##  [1] "Package"            "Type"               "Title"             
##  [4] "Version"            "Author"             "Maintainer"        
##  [7] "Description"        "Imports"            "Depends"           
## [10] "License"            "Suggests"           "VignetteBuilder"   
## [13] "Remotes"            "BugReports"         "SystemRequirements"
## [16] "RoxygenNote"

All Remotes section held, but in a list now

dcf_all[, "Remotes"]

## [[1]]
## [1] "muschellij2/fslr,muschellij2/oro.nifti"
## [2] "neuroconductor/fslr"

Behavior from devtools

No error/warning was generated (as none was generated in read.dcf), but the "last" entry of the field (in this case "Remotes") was output:

dcf_dev = devtools:::read_dcf(destfile)
dcf_dev$Remotes

## [1] "Remotes: neuroconductor/fslr"