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Collate field in package Description

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package

r

I apologize as I know that this answer is likely in the manuals for writing an R package but in my reading and looking at other package's Collate fields I can't figure out 100% what this field is for. In plain language (mine is English) what does the Collate field in the Description file of a package do? What would one want to put there?

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Tyler Rinker Avatar asked May 10 '12 01:05

Tyler Rinker


1 Answers

I think it comes from a time and situation when the order in which the files in the R/ directory were sourced (as opposed to the lexicographic default) still mattered. A similar reason for why the .onLoad() function is often in a file named zzz.R.

For what it is worth, not one of my packages uses the "Collate:" field in DESCRIPTION.

Edit: And as we're fond of empirical measures, here is a quick grep on a machine with all CRAN sources:

$ grep ^Collate */DESCRIPTION | wc -l 292 $ ls -1 */DESCRIPTION | wc -l 3779 

So that is 7.7% of all packages. I really would not worry about this unless you really must.

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Dirk Eddelbuettel Avatar answered Oct 16 '22 22:10

Dirk Eddelbuettel