This week’s assignment was to create a DESCRIPTION file for our final project package.

The DESCRIPTION file I created is on GitHub here:

https://github.com/jered0/lis4930-rpackage/blob/master/queryNIBRS/DESCRIPTION

Getting the DESCRIPTION format right was interesting, and I ended up looking at a few packages on CRAN to see what package names typically look like and how they describe themselves. For example, I thought at first that the Title field was just an expanded name for the package, but I see that it does, as you said in the module, act more as a descriptive subtitle.

Because my package will involve retrieving data from the FBI’s Crime Data API, I added an Imports section for the dependency the package will need, RCurl. I’ll look into whether that’s strictly required – I might be able to use R’s built-in web queries instead of relying on RCurl’s fancy capabilities.