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

[Warnes, Gregory R]

I've been using a cvs2cl.pl (http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl), a nice little
perl script to auto-generate GNU-style 
changelogs from CVS log information.

This site also has a proposed XML format for changelogs, and cvs2cl can
optionally produce this instead.  Finally, they have an XSLT sylesheet that
will convert the XML changlong format into an HTML/XHTML page.

How about we borrow this tool and perhaps XML format for R?

-Greg


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [mailto:edd at debian.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 1:05 PM
> To: Duncan Murdoch
> Cc: Martin Maechler; r-devel
> Subject: Re: [Rd] ChangeLog for R packages {was "Wish list"}
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> -- 
> The relationship between the computed price and reality is as 
> yet unknown.  
>                                              -- From the 
> pac(8) manual page
> 
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> 


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