According to R-exts, DESCRIPTION is a DCF variant, and " Fields start with an ASCII name immediately followed by a colon: the value starts after the colon and a space." However, according to the linked https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html, horizontal space before and after a value are trimmed, this is also the behavior of read.dcf(). Is this an omission in the documentation, or is the space after the colon actually required? Thanks. Best regards Kirill