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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 11:33:13AM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 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.

Right. I'd conjecture that it is effectively the same on Unix, i.e. I can't
see any sane project using both changelog and 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

And let's not forget that Emacs and XEmacs are available on Windows (in
various 'standard' or 'cygwin' flavours) 

> 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.

Sounds good.

Dirk

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