discussing a possible devtools issue with @hadley

problem_description

# I am not sure whether this is a) misunderstanding of the SO answer
(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662713/devtools-description-file),
b) a roxygen c) or rstudio or d) devtools issue. 
# Started out a new package using create("newpackage") from devtools. I get a description file like this:

# start of file ####
Package: newpackage
Title: 
Description: 
Version: 0.1
Authors@R: # getOptions('devtools.desc.author')
Depends:
    R (>= 3.0.2)
License: # getOptions('devtools.desc.license')
LazyData: true
Collate:
    'newpackage-package.r'

# When I run document("newpackage") I always get: 
Authors@R field gives no person with author role.
Authors@R field gives no person with maintainer role and email address
# even though I set the options like suggested on SO the same thing happens:
options(devtools.desc.author="'Matt Bannert <matthias.bannert@gmail.com> [aut, cre]'")

I also removed the #, plus I could not find the function 'getOptions' (with an 's') which is why I used base R's getOption instead as well. However, I set options(), but everytime it's not a static @Author: I receive the error message shown above. 

after all I find the #getOptions line a little bit confusing: Is it parsed (roxygen style)? Is it ignored (comments?

So the problem is that the current default values don't create a valid DESCRIPTION file?

And also it's not describing the values very well - the comments are supposed to suggest that's where the values come from when you create a new DESCRIPTION. Once you have an existing DESCRIPTION, you'll need to modify it.