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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 9/10/05, Friedrich.Leisch at tuwien.ac.at <Friedrich.Leisch at tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> >>>>> On Fri, 9 Sep 2005 10:33:03 -0700 (PDT),
> >>>>> Thomas Lumley (TL) wrote:
> 
>  > On Fri, 9 Sep 2005, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>  >>
>  >> I personally put NEWS, WISHLIST and THANKS files in the 'inst'
>  >> directory of all my source packages.  This has the effect of copying them to the
>  >> top level of the built version so that they are accessible from R via:
>  >>
> 
>  > I'm not sure that WISHLIST and THANKS need to be available to people who
>  > haven't installed the package.   NEWS, on the other hand, really does.
> 
>  > One option (if it doesn't turn out to be too much work for the CRAN
>  > maintainers) would be to have an optional Changelog field in the
>  > DESCRIPTION file giving the relative path to the file. This would mean
>  > that maintainers would not all have to switch to the same format.
>  > eg for foreign
>  >    Changelog: ChangeLog
>  > and for survey
>  >    Changelog: inst/NEWS
> 
>  > This might be enough to make it easy for CRAN to display these when the
>  > maintainer provides them.
> 
> Standard location or a mechachanism like the one you describe are both
> similar amount of work (and not much at all), the HTML pages are
> generated by perl and I have the parsed DESCRIPTION file there, i.e.,
> using a fixed name or the value of the Changelog field is basically
> the same.
> 
> .f
> 

Regarding the two possibilities I think there is an advantage in a fixed
name in a fixed location since one always knows where to look.  The 
extra level of indirection in the DESCRIPTION file just means that one 
has to fill out yet another field and the user can't know where to look
directly, for sure, but must first look it up in the DESCRIPTION file.

I think the DESCRIPTION file idea was motivated by making it easier
for existing packages but in fact I think its no harder to rename and
move a file, and maybe easier, than to add a line to the DESCRIPTION
file.   Also I think this should apply not only to NEWS/ChangeLog but
also to THANKS and WISHLIST and that would mean 3 more lines in the
DESCRIPTION file so it could rapidly get out of hand.