no date field in DESCRIPTION file

[igordot]

Is it possible to add the date field to the DESCRIPTION file with usethis? It's trivial to do it manually, but it would be nice to have it done automatically.

I realized it was missing because I got a warning with citation():

no date field in DESCRIPTION file of package

For those who may not be familiar, from Writing R Extensions:

The optional ‘Date’ field gives the release date of the current version of the package.

I saw that there was use_citation() but that is more appropriate if you have an article or a book.

[jennybc]

We are, in general, anti-Date field because it is automatically added when, say, CRAN builds your package and that Date will always be correct, by definition. So it turns out that manually tending a Date field causes more problems than it solves, because people routinely forget to update it.

Can you describe your situation more, in terms of how this package has been installed?

[igordot]

I originally tried this on a development version. The version that was installed from CRAN has the date. Thank you for clarifying. Everything makes sense now.