Should the DESCRIPTION file have a Languages field?
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Activity status
- Stale
- Tech stack
- r
- Domain
- documentation
Research direction
Start by inspecting the package's DESCRIPTION file and reviewing the NEWS files for any prior decision. Read the linked R Extensions guidance on the Language field, then use the existing issue discussion to determine whether the package documentation warrants this metadata. Done requires a maintainer decision and, if approved, a clearly defined metadata change.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
@rffontenelle was asked by a ROpenSci maintainer [^ROpenSci] why doesn't data.table have a Language field in the DESCRIPTION file. Quoting the Writing Extentions manual:
A ‘Language’ field can be used to indicate if the package documentation is not in English: this should be a comma-separated list of standard (not private use or grandfathered) IETF language tags as currently defined by RFC 5646 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5646, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag), i.e., use language subtags which in essence are 2-letter ISO 639-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1) or 3-letter ISO 639-3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3) language codes.
Our guess was this is not an oversight. However, I couldn't find any discussion about this decision in the `NEWS files nor on the GitHub issues, open or otherwise. So, I opened this issue to discuss this (argh) issue, just in case.
[^ROpenSci]: Today there was a community call for pt_BR translation of ROpenSci and we both attended to share our experience with data.table.
- Dominant language
- R
- Stars
- 3.9k
- Forks
- 1.1k
- Avg merge
- 14h 4m
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 4
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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