Better error message for malformed usethis.description

[hadley]

Might be worthwhile to save to a file and attempt to parse?

It's also particularly problematic because it causes create_package() to fail part way through, leaving you in a malformed state that you just have to blow away.

[jennybc]

Any specifics on the nature of this malformed description?

[hadley]

Two mistakes so far:

• Forgetting a closing parenthesis, so person(... doesn't parse
• Not using the correct indentation so that one line of Authors@R is interpreted as a new field

[hadley]

We could also improve the situation by allowing a direct call to person() here, rather than being forced to wrap it in a string; format(person(), style = "R") generates the code we need.

[hadley]

Reprex:

library(usethis)

options(usethis.description = list("Authors@R" = "person('Hadley', 'Wickham'"))
create_package(tempfile())
#> ✔ Creating '/tmp/RtmpjerEGN/file12f3050812b9d/'
#> ✔ Setting active project to '/private/tmp/RtmpjerEGN/file12f3050812b9d'
#> ✔ Creating 'R/'
#> Error in fmt[[1]]: subscript out of bounds
#> ✔ Setting active project to '<no active project>'

^{Created on 2020-03-17 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}