[Bioc-devel] Packages, NEWS files, CHANGELOG files

[Markus Schmidberger]

Hi,

concerning the "CHANGELOGS" and "NEWS" file discussion at the 
Bioconductor Developer day:
In the Bioconductor Changelog 
(http://fgc.lsi.umich.edu/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi) I saw, that people 
starting to rename their HISTORY or ChangeLog files to NEWS files.

I think we should stay next to the R and GNU advices:
"The package subdirectory may also contain files INDEX, ... and NEWS. 
Other files such as README or ChangeLog will be ignored by R, but may be 
useful to end-users.
For the conventions for files NEWS and ChangeLog in the GNU project see 
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#NEWS-File"

Major changes, bug fixes and releases should be written in the NEWS file.
To keep a good programming standard ALL changes made to program source 
files should be written to the "CHANGELOG" file.

There should be added a short sentence to the "BioC Package Guidelines" 
-> "Package Contents".

Best regards
Markus

-- 
Dipl.-Tech. Math. Markus Schmidberger

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
IBE - Institut für medizinische Informationsverarbeitung,
Biometrie und Epidemiologie
Marchioninistr. 15, D-81377 Muenchen
URL: http://ibe.web.med.uni-muenchen.de 
Mail: Markus.Schmidberger [at] ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de