Pull Request Overview

Opened on August 11, 2026
Status Open
Commit count 3 with first commit August 11, 2026

Total Delta

49 Total Diff Delta

Open Days

Open 39 weekdays

Test Delta

0 Diff Delta in Test Files

Breakdown by Phase

How long has this pull request spent in each phase of its lifecycle?

Fraction of total time	Business days	Phase
	5.8 days	Authoring 1 commit before pull request opened for review
	1.4 days	Awaiting first review
	31.0 days	Revising work with 2 commits in response to 0 reviews that left 1 comment

Total time for pull request still awaiting merge (longer than repo's target): 38.2 business days

[R-package] [ci] remove 'Date' field from DESCRIPTION

Contributes to #6809

Contributes to #6774

While reviewing #7392, I realized ... we probably don't need the Date: field in R-package/DESCRIPTION in source control, and could remove the machinery for updating it at build time 😁

It looks like Date is not required and has not been for a long time. Look at this comment from 2016: https://github.com/r-lib/devtools/issues/1327#issuecomment-244590948

That exactly matches what I see looking around at popular R packages. For example, {arrow} does not have a Date: field in its description (apache/arrow - r/DESCRIPTION) but a Date/Publication date is added in the CRAN package (code link).

Notes for Reviewers

If R CMD check --as-cran runs successfully in CI here, I think we can be confident in this change.

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[R-package] [ci] remove 'Date' field from DESCRIPTION #7396