[BioC] [Bioc-devel] knowing what is changed/new in release patches

[Cook, Malcolm]

Kasper,

Yes, right, the NEWS file.   

In practice I find that the NEWS files are often not updated between patch releases in the 'release' version.
	
Spot checking a list of packages that I just updated, I find some that don't have info on patch level changes, some that have a news file but whose must current entry is for an old release, and one that DOes have patch level NEWS (yeah!), and one whose NEWS is old.

For example:

no patch level release entry in NEWS 
'GenomicRanges'
'IRanges'

patch level entry in NEWS
edgeR

newest NEWS is old
VariantAnnotation

I guess what I want is svn log available from web/RSS.

Any hopes out there?

Thx

~Malcolm


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kasper Daniel Hansen [mailto:kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 2:32 PM
> To: Cook, Malcolm
> Cc: Bioconductor Newsgroup (bioconductor at stat.math.ethz.ch); bioc-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Bioc-devel] knowing what is changed/new in release patches
> 
> A package may choose to provide a NEWS file which you should be able
> to access using
>    news(package = "IRanges")
> (you can also ask for news added after a given version number, the
> query above lists the entire file).  It is optional to include and it
> is optional how detailed it is, but this is intended to be a readable
> summary of changes.
> 
> For this reason, I very strongly suggests that all packages include
> such a file.  Unfortunately, it is easy to forget to update.
> 
> Aside from this, svn log is your only friend.
> 
> Kasper
> 
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Cook, Malcolm <MEC at stowers.org> wrote:
> > Is there a generic way to learn what is changed or new in a "released" package since its release?
> >
> > For instance, IRanges was released as 1.16.0 but is now at 1.16.4.
> >
> > I'd like to know what was changed in this released version.
> >
> > I do already know that I can monitor changes to devel with either
> >         http://www.bioconductor.org/developers/svnlog/ or its RSS feed.
> > And I do.
> > And this is very useful.
> >
> > However, I don't know how to do this to the release version (i.e. to learn what changes to devel were deemed sufficiently
> important to merit a patch release to devel), other than check out the svn and use diff, which I don't want to have to do (at least for
> now).
> >
> > Am I missing something?
> >
> > Any pointers?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Malcolm Cook
> > Computational Biology - Stowers Institute for Medical Research
> >
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