R help - Apr 2015 - Package build system adds line break in DESCRIPTION URL

Has anybody noticed that if field URL in DESCRIPTION contains a uri with 
66 or more characters, then file DESCRIPTION in the resulting package 
includes a line break at the beginning?

So this (source DESCRIPTION):

URL: 
http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/data-tools/seroincidence-calculator-tool/Pages/default.aspx

becomes (again file DESCRIPTION, but inside the package)

URL:
http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/data-tools/seroincidence-calculator-tool/Pages/default.aspx

This has been tested with R on Windows 8.1 (devel 01/04/2015 and 3.1.3) 
and Linux Mint (3.1.3). It has many sad implications including not 
acceptance of such packages to CRAN.

Daniel Lewandowski <daniel <at> nextpagesoft.net> writes:
> 
> Has anybody noticed that if field URL in DESCRIPTION contains a uri with 
> 66 or more characters, then file DESCRIPTION in the resulting package 
> includes a line break at the beginning?
> 
> So this (source DESCRIPTION):
> 
> URL: 
> http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/data-tools/
   seroincidence-calculator-tool/Pages/default.aspx
> 
> becomes (again file DESCRIPTION, but inside the package)
> 
> URL:
> http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/data-tools/seroincidence-calculator-tool/
   Pages/default.aspx
> 
> This has been tested with R on Windows 8.1 (devel 01/04/2015 and 3.1.3) 
> and Linux Mint (3.1.3). It has many sad implications including not 
> acceptance of such packages to CRAN.
> 
  (links line-broken above to make gmane happy).

  Haven't tested, but seems it would not be *too* hard to trace
through the code to see what's happening in the package-building
process.  Two thoughts:

 (1) as a workaround, could you use a URL-shortener such as tinyurl?
tinyurl allows you to specify a somewhat meaningful name for the
shortened URL, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/reproducible-000

 (2) this feels like it is more suitable for r-devel at r-project.org

  Ben Bolker