r-lib / pak

A fresh approach to package installation
https://pak.r-lib.org
671 stars 60 forks source link

Documentation of extra fields {pak} adds to the `DESCRIPTION` #598

Open wurli opened 7 months ago

wurli commented 7 months ago

From the pak documentation, I've found some discussion of a few fields which are added to the DESCRIPTION files of packages installed using pak. However, as a package developer, I would find it helpful to have a single page to document these and explain how they are used by pak, and how they are intended to be used by other parties.

Many thanks - pak is an amazing package 😃

gaborcsardi commented 7 months ago

Thanks! They are not intended to be used by other parties currently, hence they are also not documented.

wurli commented 7 months ago

Fair enough! Perhaps there's then a question about whether this should be more explicitly noted in the documentation. AFAIK, DESCRIPTION files are intended to be read by users (although doubtless this is happens fairly rarely), and documentation definitely does exist for the standard fields. Perhaps simply a list of the fields which pak adds would be helpful, so users can at least get a quick idea of which fields are non-standard?