[Rd] news file included in source but not binary package
Friedrich.Leisch at ci.tuwien.ac.at
Friedrich.Leisch at ci.tuwien.ac.at
Thu Jun 24 22:14:53 CEST 2004
>>>>> On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 10:37:49 -0400,
>>>>> Liaw, Andy (LA) wrote:
> Thanks to Brian, Roger and Dirk for the pointer to inst. I do remember it,
> but R-exts doesn't really suggest what that directory is for, merely what
> would happen to files placed there. For a source package, though, that
> seems a rather obscure place to put a `NEWS' file...
I agree ...
> On a slightly different topic: May I suggest inclusion of something like
> the following (suitably modified, if need be) in the next version of R (and
> perhaps even advertise it in the startup message)?
> news <- function(package=NULL, lib.loc=NULL) {
> if (is.null(package)) {
> file.show(file.path(R.home(), "NEWS"),
> title=paste("NEWS for R-",
> paste(R.version[c("major", "minor")], collapse=".")))
> } else {
> ## check if package is installed
> pkgs <- installed.packages(lib.loc=lib.loc)
> which <- match(package, pkgs[, "Package"])
> if (is.na(which)) stop(package, "not found")
> newsfile <- file.path(pkgs[which, "LibPath"], "NEWS")
> if (!file.exists(newsfile)) stop("Sorry, no news from Lake
> Wobegon...")
> file.show(newsfile, title=paste("NEWS for ",
> paste(pkgs[which, c("Package", "Version")],
> collapse="_")))
> }
> }
You might want to take a look at the system.file() function, that
reduces the above quite condiderably :-)
But to get to the heart of the email (something similar was proposed
by Greg Warnes a few weeks ago): We should definetely provide a simple
mechanism to see the latest changes in a package.
Question: I am aware of files calles NEWS and ChangeLog (or CHANGELOG,
etc.) holding the relevant information ... are there any others we
want/need to respect?
best,
fritz
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