[Rd] Issue tracking in packages [was: Re: [R] change in read.spss, package foreign?]

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 9/9/05, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > How about if there were just a standard location and name such as inst/NEWS,
> > inst/WISHLIST, inst/THANKS (which has the advantage that they are automatically
> > made available in the built package under the current way packages are
> > built)
> 
> The problem is that there *isn't* a standard location. As Robert Gentleman

Yes, I know.  That was the point of my post -- declare a standard location
that everyone would use (or not but if they don't then people will have a hard
time finding their info but no worse than now).

> has pointed out, if you only maintain two or three packages it isn't too
> bad to change them to some new layout, but if you are the bioconductor
> project it gets painful quite quickly.

Surely there are only a few possibilities that are used and a simple script
could fix that all up.  Its the same problem if you have to modify every 
DESCRIPTION file.

At any rate I don't think this should be driven by compatibility with what
is there now since its not a difficult one-time transition.

> 
> Also, there are good reasons for having NEWS in the top level directory.
> Nearly everything that isn't an R package does this, because it's a useful
> standard.

This could be handled by having the build procedure
copy NEWS, WISHLIST and THANKS
files at the top level to the build rather than not copying them.  That way one 
would not have to put them in the inst directory -- although unlike my previous 
suggestion this would require modifying the build software though its
presumably
not a big change.  I agree that this would be worth it.