checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... NOTE

Question

I am developing a package in R and when I run devtools::check() I am getting the following note.

checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... NOTE Malformed Description field: should contain one or more complete sentences.

I am not using my name of the package or the word package in the description. I am also using complete sentence for the description yet I am getting this NOTE repeatedly. So I am wondering what does a complete sentence mean in this case.

Answer 1

Try adding periods to the ends of the sentences, that is, turn your existing Description field into Functions to analyze methylation data can be found here. Highlight of this workflow is the comprehensive quality control report.

I've always found it a bit curious that the Description field shouldn't contain the word "package" or the name of the package ...and also requires complete sentences (which require both a subject and a verb, leading to very grammatically awkward constructs if you want your introductory sentence to have a subject without using the no-no words.) I'm pretty sure that grammatically speaking, very few packages have truly "complete" sentences in their Description fields.

I'm pretty sure that it just checks for capital letters and periods, and I'd avoid any special characters, just to be on the safe side.

The Description field of my package on CRAN is Reads river network shape files and computes network distances. Also included are a variety of computation and graphical tools designed for fisheries telemetry research, such as minimum home range, kernel density estimation, and clustering analysis using empirical k-functions with a bootstrap envelope. Tools are also provided for editing the river networks, meaning there is no reliance on external software. Definitely not the greatest, but apparently it worked and CRAN liked it!