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

[A.J. Rossini]

Duncan Murdoch <dmurdoch at pair.com> writes:

> 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.

It should be easy enough for someone to write a changelog function in
R, I'd assume, which might solve this?  

(of course, I'm not volunteering until 2009).
-- 
rossini at u.washington.edu            http://www.analytics.washington.edu/ 
Biomedical and Health Informatics   University of Washington
Biostatistics, SCHARP/HVTN          Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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