[Rd] ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 08:49:34 +0100, Martin Maechler
<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote :

>"Of course" "R CMD check" would have the harder job of also have
>to work properly on non-Debian, non-Linux, even non-Unix systems..
>For Windows, there's already the filename capitalization mess.

Just as long as the filenames are case-insensitively unique, we're
okay.  So no changelog coexisting with ChangeLog.

>    Dirk> Would that help?  In order to parse a Changelog, we'd
>    Dirk> need a common format.  We could start with the
>    Dirk> standard emacs mode (with vi or, mercy on them,
>    Dirk> notepad users can emulate free-hand).  Or is all this
>    Dirk> too restrictive?
>
>I would be very much in favor of this.  But then I'm biased:
>Using Emacs 100% and using ChangeLog's for most of my packages
> {for those who don't know: "C-x 4 a" = add-change-log-entry-other-window
>  this works even from an PKG/R/foo.R file, adding to toplevel
>  PKG/ChangeLog, automatically inserting the R/foo.R filename
>  (and a function name) there.
> }

As long as we give clear documentation about what the format should
be, and it's not too obscure, I don't see a problem for Windows users
here.  Non-Windows users (and the INSTALL script) should be prepared
to handle CR-LF line terminations, because not all editors make it
easy to avoid those; there's also the possibility of the last line not
being terminated.  But those are easy problems with standard
solutions.

Duncan