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

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 9/10/05, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at> wrote:
> >>>>> Thomas Lumley writes:
> 
> > 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 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.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> And similar things could be said about Emacs users with ChangeLog files
> in top-level package directories ...
> 
> I like the suggestion about using a Changelog (or whatever it would be
> called) field in the package DESCRIPTION meta-data.  If we have that, we
> could not only use this for repository-side presentation of the package,
> but also install such info and have a simple show_package_change_log()
> function ...

One could have that without this meta data.  show_package_change_log
could just check if the file is present.