The check summaries now available at
http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary.html
will indicate most of the problems being detected in CRAN packages: look
at the log (click on the link) for your package in the first or second
column.
On Sun, 7 Dec 2008, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> It seems that many package authors do not proofread the help installed with
> their packages. The Rd converter is not a parser, and it will silently
> produce incorrect results on incorrect input (and some correct input).
>
> Here are a few hints about some common errors:
>
> 1) When you run R CMD check you get a PDF manual at
> <pkg>.Rcheck/<pkg>-manual.pdf. Read through it looking for
missing/empty and
> mis-formatted entries.
>
>
> 2) Try installing the package under a current R-devel (as of today). This
> will report on errors of the form
>
> \item{foo} {item text}
>
> with, NB, invalid space between the two arguments. Earlier versions of R
> assume that the item had no text and so '{item text}' is never
processed (not
> even checked for validity). This results in at best missing information
and
> at worse nonsense.
>
>
> 3) Grep the installed help for internal constructs, e.g.
>
> grep normal-bracket <installed-package>/help/*
>
> Three ways I have found such constructs to appear in the processed files:
>
> a) If you see 'eqnnormal-bracket' then you have a one-argument \eqn
(or
> possibly \deqn) command immediately followed by }. This is correct Rd but
> mis-processed in earlier versions of R. In all the cases I have seen it
> comes from grammatically incorrect help files of the form
>
> \item{foo}{... \eqn{x}}
>
> where the item should end in ',' or '.'. But if you
don't want to do that,
> at least use a space before the brace. I found this in packages
> distrMod, flexclust, geepack, geoR, psychometric, robustbase and uroot.
>
> b) Many packages have help files with 'normal-bracket' at the end
of a
> processed \value section. In all the cases I looked at, this results from
> using \itemize{} inside \value -- that does not work as \value is
implicitly
> an itemize environment.
>
> c) Using markup in verbatim-like environments will lead to nonsensical
> output: it seems the most common error is to use \code inside \examples.
What
> markup is allowed where is not very well defined: Duncan Murdoch has
started
> to document this at http://developer.r-project.org/parseRd.pdf but that
> currently is more a description of what should happen, not what has been
> implemented.
>
> These issues are not rare (except 3a): about 10% of CRAN packages have
them.
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
>
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595